


Down

by wolf_shadoe



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Canon-broken, F/M, Insanity, Season/Series 07, Why Joss why
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:40:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21635254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolf_shadoe/pseuds/wolf_shadoe
Summary: Spike's insane in the basement...Season 7, veering off-canon somewhere after Beneath You. No potentials, no dangerous jewellery, no Angel-cooties. Just a handful of broken people, one hungry evil, and hopes of a happier ending.
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers
Comments: 15
Kudos: 31





	1. Falling

**Author's Note:**

> Had this one on the backburner for a while, because it absolutely refuses to conform to anything I attempt to tell it to do. So it is what it is, for better or worse, here you go and I hope someone enjoys. Updates weekly, unless I find some free time to get more chapters ahead.  
> Betaed by Micrindle23, who totally rocks for successfully wading through all my weirdness 💙  
> Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

Yeah, uh, this is the most non-conformy chapter. Blame Spike. Or maybe the First. Anyway, the ones following will be firmly third-person past-tense and more with the sense.

\- Speech this chapter tagged like this "Or sometimes like this" _or once or twice like this_. Just roll with it.

Credit for a line or two each (or mangled ones) to Alanis Morissette, Hozier, and Stevie Smith.

On with the show...

* * *

** \--X-- **

_ Where are you going?  _ he asked himself hourly in the moonless night of an African desert. His feet were walking, or maybe he was falling, from the dark sky above to the darker sands below, from the dark side of the moon to the dark side of the earth, falling, forever falling, arms out in surrender still.   


Was this what it meant to fall, to truly fall, in love?

_ How did you wind up here?   
_

That one, he had some inkling of.

Long ago (lifetimes ago, millennia ago, twenty months and ten thousand miles ago), things had unfolded in his chest, and he'd thought they were wings, fluttering in his stomach and uplifting from within. Her shining so bright that she must surely be within reach. No why, no how, just close your eyes to all else and let go. Gravity. Trust hers. Don't ask what you're doing. He'd felt weightless, for that briefest endless moment of glorious swan dive.   


They weren’t wings.   


He could only plummet so far before he hit concrete. Him, her, eventually, both of them. Bones broke, preconceptions shattered, self-image fractured permanently along unseen faultlines. He'd thought he'd landed somewhere, in the rubble of that empty home. But it was only the first floor. Soon enough he discovered just how much further there was to fall.   


Basements have sub-basements and the floor of his bedroom was bedrock; surely this was it. But she'd floated away into the light while he tore open on the rocky floor.  _ I'm using you, and it's killing me.  _ She may have sunk far enough to meet him, but she belonged high above, to a whole different hemisphere. Truth sunk, too: he couldn't fall through this floor to follow.   


Darkness became him, but having felt the sun's touch he could not let it go. Tried to follow. To leave his black coating behind on the rail and elevate himself to her. Thought he could circumvent something; he'd forgotten about all the black still wrapping his skin. It writhed like serpents within him and dripped his poison into her eyes. Things-  
  


He-

Yeah.  
  


There are mirrors in bathrooms, and for the first time in one hundred and twenty-two years he came face to face with what he had become.   


Couldn’t stay in the hole then. He cast a look over his shoulder, and realised he no longer recognised the place he'd jumped off from, nor wanted to go back. He looked forward at the bedrock, and knew it was claw through or die trying.   


Maybe he didn’t have wings, but he had fists, fangs, tenacity. Having expended them all, he stumbled from a hole in the earth carrying a spark inside to stamp his visa ( _ God, how it burnt _ ). Maybe he was still smashed and broken on a rocky floor, but at least now he was on the right side of it.

And now he was falling all over again. In love; different, more complex than ever, than he could have imagined (god, how he'd misunderstood her sense of responsibility, her self-hatred, the weight she carried). Afoul of himself (night after night after night - and the occasional day - drenched in blood-murder-mayhem-slaughter and his laughing face on them all). Falling into despair and under her spell and mostly just - falling down. 

  
  


_ Where are you going?   
_

Leaping from the moon on malformed wings, ever striving for the sun.   


_ You'll burn. _   


Maybe, but first I'll feel its warmth.

_ Stop. _ His feet did.

The circular debate picked up steam again. Seemed to get blurrier each time -

Ought to leave her be. Let her forget.   


Owe her the opportunity to finish things.   


Can't stay away from her. Can't face her.   


Can't make her face me. Can't hide from her. 

See:   
thought I could grab the prize and swagger (grovel) back  
had a speech ready and all  
But wasn't that the fucking joke of the century?   
Stupid boy.

face the lies and the lies become fact  
some things can't ever be undone   
must not ever go back.   


so run, run the opposite way  
is there somewhere further than this  
A fricken desert   
from the sunshine of California?   
bring a man a globe, would you, need to find the antipodes   
(or perhaps the Mariana)

not away though towards always towards   
can't get away it's   
turnabout turnaround all roads lead to the mouth of hell these days

every time i choose  _ flee!  
_ there's this  
shining plastic buffy barbie  
beckoning   
leading   
(smiling)  
all faux, fakery, faerie falsehoods only   
not real i know   
but  
irresistible to follow still so   
trail the starpath back  
to   
sunnyhell.

find the cavern hole below beneath go back   
to roots always, don't we?  
cave creatures hiding at the fire's edge  
or maybe it's a vampire thing, searching basements for lost graves we should have stayed in   


still   
there's barbie-buffy down here too  
whispering secrets   
whispering venom

's company at least   
(barrel of laughs, this whole joke)

know her game, i do. thinks she's getting one over, yank my chain and make me dance   
but i hear the notes between the lines she plants   


(play the wrong side, i do)  
(it's a gift)

so listen close to find the ticket and here it is:  
there's someone not been paid.  
(an extra soul's snuck onto the earthbound train)  
grabbed its attention, she did, with that little manoeuver   
broke the rules   
(she's good at that)  
now it's breaking them too

there's this chanting   
building beneath us coming and seeping up between us  
about and around everything rising under the ground   
clawing and gnashing with want   
(what we all want)  
(to be free)

fixing this mess - it's going to   
cost dearly  
( _ always  _ consequences)  
tossing the stowaway can't be asked and can't be told   
(girl's got that bleeding heart martyr complex down too damn well)  
can we pay with dirty currency, please? one soul won fair and square here   
stained as it may be  
take it. take it this part from me  
slayer, it's what you'll need and  
it's free too.

so got to tell her warn her give her write her  
a new speech   
render it in words, rehearse, rote learn it  
say buff, buff, this thing, this thing beneath, it wants: drag down gobble up devour debase.

wrong words willie, she won't understand   
could show her instead, could paint it on her skin once  
but now no touch and  _ don't touch _ , your touch burns with cold  
always cold now, grave cold. making shivers

it comes to me in these plastic shapes  
kind and gentle, sadistic and mental   
morphing and melding slayer to mother to the child that is Dru  
and back again   
i'm waiting for the day it pops up as a tupperware jar  
until   
one day 

she comes real (maybe)

oh, my dear duckling  
not time for you yet  
my speech isn't ready, you see  
(i think i lost it somewhere in Africa)  
take a ticket, take a seat  
please wait in line.

** \--X-- **

Illusion. All he was. Product (production) of the manifest spirits dredging the dark corners of her psyche for a shape that would thoroughly unsettle her mid-fight. And it had, as proved by the tender spot on the back of her head tonight.

_ (Always been here. Cheers for stopping by.) _

He always would be, too; loitering in the corners of her mind, draped in his cloak of shadows and a wisp of smoke, that smirk teasing the edge of his mouth. No matter how fiercely she closed her eyes.

Illusion,  _ illusion,  _ **_ illusion.  _ ** He had to be.   
Because if he was not…   


She rubbed at the bruise on her head again, probing her fingertips into it, analysing the sensation of contused flesh. Pain wasn't illusory.   


_ Are you real? _

Was she hoping that he was, or that he was not? She didn't want to know.   
But it was her fingers seeking out pain from her damaged nerve endings.

_ (I tried to cut it out.)  
((Anything to make these feelings stop. I just wanted it to stop.)) _

Love, heart, undead life? She didn't want to know that either.   


So she lay in her bed, and poked at her bruise, and tried not to think.   


** \--X-- **

time to go   
conductor says  
ain't hardly half ready 

\- Not a thing to be done about that now,   
it says,  
\- Time's a ticking

so: the missive to deliver.   


wrap it up  
wrap all the insanity up  
(what, a man can't know when he's insane? shut it, Heller)  
search lockers in the dark to find the wrapping   
a white hat uniform it's   
what they all wear to cover the demons inside   
blue shirt, bleach the blackout, play pretend   
where's the speech gone now though?

(it's a splinter in my chest, this soul to fill the hole, and if she'd only spear it through with her sturdier one   
she could pin it there to keep while the rest blows away free)

Fuck was I on about?   


oh jesus.

Coherency's a bloody bad idea these days, it lets the guilt break down to specifics. Slap-slap-slap of crashing waves and ricochets instead of one unending river of it. But the order's come:

\- Join the team. Apologise, atone, and then you're in place   


no such thing as atonement here, but i'll offer a hand if that'll do? sure the girl could use another sandbag for what's coming   


\- That'll do. Get over there.

it doesn't know i know things   
or maybe does but doesn't care

\- I'm beyond her understanding, Sparky, she's just a girl

(always underestimate her, they do. those bubblegum nails are real weapons)

  
  


So: hello, dear duckling, and how've you been?   


"Do not start by saying you're sorry."

_ Sorry. adjective:  
\- in a poor or pitiful state.  
\- unpleasant and regrettable, especially on account of incompetence or misbehaviour.  
superlative adjective: sorriest  
_ (don't need to state the obvious)  
not what she meant though.

so,   
\- I didn't come here to atone.

bits of my speech allowed:   
\- Something's coming. Big, ugly, and damned. Ball's in your court, Slayer.   


"Spike and I will check out the scene."

she hath spake.

righty-o then.

Outside:  
take this torch i'm carrying, please.   
(love burns, baby, and i'm not equippable)  
she makes a:  
sharp harsh stinging-  _ flinch  _ !   
it's my  _ flinch!  
_ (i put it there)  
recoil recant remove and undo  
but some things can't ever be undone, remember?

\- Make use of me if you want.   
it's what i'm here for   
i think  
wish i could remember the rest. things i had to tell her i know. but she's after the wrong secret

and demon bird's-

found it.

fighting then, and this game i know. Shoulda come in with it really, given her the lie to begin: demons don't change.   
_ (We were born sick, you heard them say it)  
_ bit more goading and she's sure to offer her brand of peace. Know the big bad hasn't brought me here to help her but i'm here now, can give her satisfaction. Public execution, step right up. Get yourself a front-row seat, scoobies. ( _ I'll show you my sins and you can sharpen your knife) _

she hares off instead. work to be done, worms to hunt.  
we’ll all be worm food soon enough  
well, maybe not me; allow it in the figurative, please.   


things get a bit muddled after that.

** \--X-- **

There's smoke but no mirrors, illusions shattered and him shattered, fractured, broken and burning before her on the altar of his love.  _ Oh god. Ohgodohgodoh- _ Too much-too big-too-   


Claws rake through her, claws like sturdy knives tearing up through her belly and chest, lungs and breast, clawing to gut her, insides to outsides in a puddle on the floor; she'll tangle in her own intestines now and fall torn to the ground.   


She retches, making the puddle, a bitch's offering to her pup,  _ I have hunted you this flesh.  _ It's all bile, vile, corrosive acid; what she has to feed on, what she's held inside. Her love doesn't burn; it eats away. Is this for him, then? She can't give him love. But here is an emotion of one kind or another, finally expelled for his perusal, approval, refusal.  _ Make me feel _ and  _ I'll make you feel it. _ Love - hate - fear; maybe the four-letter word she feels for him is,   
** p a i n.   
**

** \--X-- **

sound of her retching drags me off the cross like a bucket of cold water  
think i might be sick  
didn't mean to pass it on  
just another sin to confess i guess   
she bends at the waist to vomit all over the church floor   
(never seen the slayer's stomach revolt before   
guess i never showed her the right level of disgust)

two of me still want to comfort her somehow   
it'll be okay (but it won't) i'll leave now (but i can't)   


i mustn't tell lies.  
instead,  
\- didn't mean to make a priest of you. was supposed to be a secret.   


"I…" she says.   
littlest word, that is. shouldn't be able to apply to her.

fault lines of salt on her cheeks   
god, pet, don't you cry my faults  
i daren't kneel   
no right to ask her absolution   
so i'm stuck standing here now with a cross branded between us  
an x for: No!  
for: Stop!  
blistering flesh to mark all things holy against me

her tears keep rolling in single drips   
the why takes a while to sink in (always was a bit slow in these things)  
i get there eventually though: she's trying to shoulder this too  
s'pose i have just thrown it on her back   
souls matter to the girl, no matter how black they are. Knew that, is why i thought i wanted one after all. Stupid, stupid, stupid, shoulda gone the other way, chip out and back in black and pick up the roles we're made for. Now i'm piling dirt beneath her feet and she's shoving it in her pockets because she knows there's a spark in it somewhere and all that glitters is hers.

\- you should leave,  
i tell her,  
\- forget about this

there's a gulp and an almost snort and a high-pitched squeak of, " _ Forget?"  
_ i guess she's caught the insanity too.

\- it's alright. i'll walk you home  
i say.  
like a gentleman. 

i lead her outside and here's the other waiting:   
\- Good work, Sparky. Now be a good boy and run home.

\- i have to go now,  
i tell her,  
\- appointments to keep.

girl's still stunned-mullet salt and bile brine.

i nod, dip my head, be the gentleman  
\- excuse me

but she follows   
back to school, back to stairwell

\- you mustn't come here  
i say  
\- it's not your place   


"Spike…" she says, then remembers: there are no words.

\- it's where the ghosts live. and it's very cold. Go away!

i don't want to go down there. things are waiting.   
but she doesn't go, so i go first. Then she runs away.

  
  


she stays away, good girl.  
can pick out her steps on the ceiling each morning   
follow beneath, entrance to office, office to entrance.   
devour the sound of her voice from above 

the other voices too:

\- You see what you've done, don't you? You've made a victim of the girl with all this soul business. Claimed her narrative and damseled her. See, you ran away from her righteous justice for what you did, stole the kill she was owed, and there's no closure for her now, staking a different beast inside the old shell.

(he's right, too)

don't get why he's haunting me though  
wasn't even in town when snakey went kablooey  
guess it's just this place  
'sides, everyone always wants to see a show.

talk to her sometimes. the not-her, the other-buffy.   
(it's okay to confess to her, because the other won't know)

\- something of you died in that alleyway, i know  
when i was too blind to see where your blows were landing  
sometimes think that was the worst thing i did to you in it all  
but now i see maybe this is worse.

\- And what about what I did to you?   
she asks.

worst thing she ever did to me was treat me like a man  
gives a fella wrong ideas, that does.   
but,  
\- you messed up my doilies   
i tell her

she knows i lie.

nighttimes vanish sometimes:  
feel the sun go down, then it's coming up again.   
think it's a nasty trick, to keep me in this town

need to suss out why it wants me here. think i knew before. think i knew something she needed to know, too. gets hard to keep track.   


there're books here, ancient pens. fill my pockets so the next time i remember i can write. it. down.   


all gone all wibbly wobble wacky now though   
claim it cover up with it just let it   


take   
  


you   
  


away.

  
  


she comes looking one day. think it might be real her. so i hide in ratty-corners.

\- Don't forget the team,  
it says afterwards,   
\- You’re supposed to be enlisting   


i remember then,

i had a speech.   
  


so when she comes again:

_ help _ we say this time, there's, there's a missive, for your mission   
bit mish-mash-muddled though   
_ you want my help?  _ she spits fire now the real fire scorching  
(real buffy then, and i think i must have insulted her afore i worked that one out)  
\- no, dove. white flag waving. want  _ to _ help.  
so  _ please,  _ say  _ please,  _ the cold,   
\- the cold is coming for you, sunshine.   
shivers shaking shudders.   
and she goes.

nobody hears a dead man's moaning

** \--X-- **

Full-on wig-athon in the basement when she finally finds him unhidden. He mumbles and raves, whispers and moans. Snarls and growls, then cowers from himself. Croons twisted lyrics at her in a rough-edged lilting rhythm, lullabies made horror stories by the blankness on his face. Broken fragments of what might be poetry spill softly from his lips, then he swears at the walls again.  _ Why won't you do your job? _ he asks her.  _ Vampire, see? _

She doesn't say,  _ please don't make me kill you.  _ Not because she couldn't do it if she had to. She did it to Angel; surely she could do it to him. It was her duty.   


She doesn't say it, because the words might come out too honest;  _ Please don't let me have killed you.   
_

The basement air is stale fear, and her tongue tastes caustic again. What is her duty to the besouled?  _ Cold, _ he'd said; start with the small words, and this is the easiest of the four-letter ones. Cold; antonym for  _ warm, _ which she can't be, but maybe there's a synthetic option somewhere. She'd bring the coat, but that's Spike’s, and he's not him. So she gathers the throw blanket from the end of her bed, the one that's soft to wrap herself in. The one that's everything she never was.  _ Take this belated offering.   
_

(She was much too cold always, and he's drowning down there)

** \--X-- **

when she comes back she's cold again no fire now  
but. glimpse her face as she gives soft -thing- with no edges over to me  
ice in her face now  
that's the girl, ice and fire, apocalypse nigh and going out with a whimper and a bang

mustn't touch the -thing- she gave or it will vanish of course   
so watch it there grounded that day night while time   


lavender it is in eyes but raspberry, raspberry smell all around it and more much more: sweat and sunshine   
and on in all bound into the middle is   
tears  
little crystals of salt from slayer eyes   
(should eat vamp bodies away like acid, slayer tears should)

her tears though, ground no place for those   
so can't in the end leave it down there in the dust those tears and gather up-  
not vanishing!   
and the scent so strong now so find middle to hold tears in and wrap, wrap around me so all of the world is a lavender bubble.   


sit in the bubble and get it straight

screw your head back on, boy, don't worry which way it goes, these things have ways of working out  
break the problem down  
everything breaking down but the parts will stay together here in raspberry-salt-bubble-land so let them spill about

arrange them like cross words and see what we have.   


Here are the spaces between the lines:

it wants me to get in position   
it doesn't want her dead  
it wants her broken   
it wants her to turn her coat inside.

need to get it to her somehow   
so i write these things upstairs on the white boards in the dark night  
but watch them all come out as:  _ from beneath you…  _   
  


She comes again, and asks me about the whiteboards.   
\- i think i was trying to broadcast something  
i tell her

"You have to get out of this basement," she says.

\- i must not  
i tell her   
\- it's where i live   


She watches me inside the blanket, waiting for more.   


\- i'm the creature in between   
i say.   
i point at the ceiling: - beneath you   
i point at the floor: - atop it.  
i point at Angelus: - and you be quiet.

"That’s it," she says, tight and remote. "You can't stay here. Get up."

She's angry now, and no one can stand against her when she's wearing this face. I am going with her whether I want to or not.   


I sneer at the wall as we leave.  _ She's taking me away. You can't stop her. _


	2. Hide

** \--X-- **

Wrapped in the blanket, he followed her from the school, through the streets, into her kitchen. She left the lights off, partially from concern that they might spook him, more from fear of revealing too much under them. Too much of her, too little of him.  _ Now what?  _ Hadn't thought this through. Only, down there was no place for him. There was no place for him. Or there shouldn't be.   


He stood waiting for instructions, guidance; she had no more for him than she did for the students who paraded past her desk. Still he waited, meek and passive, eyes on the floor, a broken toy unearthed from a forgotten sandpit. Her broken toy. She wanted to suggest he shower, change from the dust-coated blue shirt that wasn't Spike, but that would mean taking him to the bathroom. And a change in packaging wouldn't disguise the contents.   


"I shouldn't be here," he said suddenly, something clearing on his face to reveal the anxiety underneath. "It wants me to be here, so I shouldn't."

"Who…?"  _ wants you here? Wait, no, don't go there. _

"I don't know," he said, shrinking in further. "I'm sorry. I don't know anything."

She huffed a frustrated breath. The last thing she wanted to do was confront this. But, _help,_ he'd said, and sure, she'd misunderstood his meaning and snarked a knee-jerk response in panic, but the quaver of the word had fallen into her chest and stayed there, a little pebble rattling on her ribs. He wouldn't dare ask, she saw now; he finally understood her angry jibes of times past, and wore their labels with an honesty they'd never held. If there was to be help, it was in her hands to offer. In her hands to shape.   


"Are you hungry?" she asked eventually, some ingrained protocol of  _ hostess _ and  _ kitchen  _ kicking in. Then kicked herself - she didn't have anything to offer if he said yes.

He frowned a little, then it deepened into confusion. "I don't think so."

Distracted though she'd been by the wounds on his chest the other night, she had noted distantly that he hadn't looked underfed beneath them. In fact, if she could get past the haunting grey shadows surrounding his eyes, he looked better nourished than he had since… for a long time. "Don't think so?

"I've still got my chip," he said quickly. "I haven't- I can't…"

_ My  _ chip _. _ For all the times she'd worried what could happen if he managed to get it out, hearing him claim thankful ownership of it now sickened her.   


She stamped the feeling down, ground it under heel like the rest of them. "I'll pick up some blood tomorrow."

"I can't stay here," he said in a mumble. "Have to stay beneath. Only allowed out to enlist. Master says."

_ Great. We're back on the crazy train. _ "Well, I say you are staying here. Until we work something else out. You can sleep in my old room tonight."

He looked up at her, haunted eyes leaping wide. In a shaky murmur, he said, "I'm not safe, Buffy."

"What do you mean?"

"Bad things. William is a  _ bad _ idea. I'll put you in the basement." A tremor of what looked disturbingly like real fear ran through him, and he pulled the blanket tighter, huddling inside it and ducking his face away behind it. He heaved in a breath, then looked up again, fixing her with an intense, motionless stare to say, "I have to go."   


He took two quick steps towards the door before, "Wait," she said, and grabbed his wrist. Cold, resisting flesh beneath her palm jolted her, an electric shock of adrenaline making her leap back in a flash of panic as her brain filled with an image of white tiles and  _ No, Spike, please…   
_

He startled back too, skittering away and down to a crouch by the back door where he scrabbled at the closed edge like a desperate feral cat, blunt and broken nails clawing at the wood.

"Stop it!" she shouted, stamping her foot hard enough to shake things on the counter. Spike froze. She took a deep and let it out slowly, pulling everything back inside and crossing her arms over it before she spoke. "You can stay in the basement. This basement. My basement. Okay?"

"Is there a bathtub?" he asked, a hint of eagerness colouring the question.   


"You want-"   


He held out the backs of his wrists, presented in supplication with his fingers curled away and his head bowed behind them.

"Oh." She paused, thinking, not-feeling. "Yes. There's chains down there."

"Good. Good girl. Buffy is a good girl."

_ Ho boy.  _ She indicated the route to the basement door with her head, and he led the way. 

  
  
  


She kept her explanations brief when Dawn came home:  _ Spike’s staying in our basement. I'm the adult here, and I say so.  _ It sounded better than,  _ There's a stranger chained up in our basement and holy fuck what am I doing? _

Dawn was angry in her cold, haughty way ( _ does she get that from me?) _ , but with a toss of her head she left the argument undone, citing homework.   


Which was good, because Buffy was afraid to try and explain further. Think further. Open the lid of the box she was shoving in the attic.   


Standing at the sink that night, she zoned out to the sound of his voice filtering up from below, mumbled conversations with ghosts of his own making. She'd hoped he'd get a grip once they got back here - he'd seemed somewhat together in her hallway the other night - but once he'd had her chain him to the wall, he'd retreated under the blanket and told her to leave him alone. She'd acquiesced, and then the muttering started. Was she doing the right thing? There was no one to ask. No helpful guidelines. She could only do, blindly.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Sanity came washing down in sleep, and for a long moment after waking he wished the disconnect would return; fleeing in crazed circles was more comfortable than being held in place by this crushing weight. He sat up awkwardly, eyeing the chains shackling his wrists to the wall, the camp stretcher he was on, the lavender blanket. The rest of the room was familiar territory;  _ Buffy’s basement. _ There was no missing the scent, a fuzzy blanket of its own that he berated himself for indulging in even as he inhaled slowly again. The  _ slayer's pet  _ jibe had never felt more appropriate. With a groan, he leaned his head back on the wall and closed his eyes, sifting through fractured snatches of memory to reconstruct a sequence of: Buffy coming - walking here - a terror in the kitchen - a drill sergeant stamping his papers and assigning this bunk.   


Put a question mark over the last one; it didn't seem to fit. Ah, see, logic was onboard today. Okay, what else? The house above sounded quiet, quiet in an empty way. They were probably at school. They shouldn't go there. There shouldn't be a  _ there _ . But someone always has to go and rebuild the arena for another round, call back last decade's champion for another bout in the ring. God, he'd been so selfish with his words the other night. She was never going to get to rest. Not until death finally claimed her for keeps.   


Footsteps sounded on the front porch; the rattle of a key chain, Buffy shifting her weight. He slicked back his hair as best he could, straightened his clothing (frowned at the blue shirt in puzzlement), put the blanket down on the bed. Pulled together the threads available to project sanity, sound decision making,  _ sorry about last night, over it now, ta and ta-ra and if you'd just unlock these then I'll be on my merry way…   
_

She came partway down the basement stairs, feet soft and quiet as she bent over to see if the creature was awake. Warm light from the hallway followed in her wake, spilling around to backlight her, highlight her, an angel born of sunlight descending into the darkness. The words dried away on his tongue, and he had to suppress an urge to bow his head to the ground before her in reverence.  _ Oh heavenly creature, blessed be thy name.   
_

Then she reached the floor and stepped into shadow, external glow left behind to leave her cold and remote. Makeup carefully applied, subdued clothing carefully chosen, holding up her cardboard cutout for the world. He used to think he could always see what was behind this facade of hers, that he had some unique  _ insight,  _ but either she's got better at construction, or he's left the gift behind in Africa, because all he sees now is a towering castle wall that he's afraid to breach.

"You look better," she said, no clues in tone or word. "I mean, I hear sanity's a hot look this season." Her eyes too penetrating as they analysed his composure, judging clearly just how well he matched the fashion this morning.   


"Yeah." He dropped his gaze, embarrassed to stare, to look upon the face of justice when her sword was sheathed. "I'm sorry," he mumbled.  _ Didn't mean to be your problem.  _ Remembered too late he'd sworn not to say those little words to her; never could learn when to shut the bloody fuck up.   


"I went to get some blood. You were sleeping."

He nodded, tongue bitten back at last and thoughts blurring with it.   


"I'll get you some," she said quietly, and before he could pull himself out enough to object she was gone again, back up those stairs.

  
  
  


"Decided not to come back here," he told her over his mug.

"This house?"

"...Yeah. Or Sunnydale. California. America."

"What, you just took a wrong turn?"

"Took a lot of wrong turns," he mumbled to himself. Risk a look up; make sure she hears right. "But coming back here. I wanted to run the other way, soon as I… when it… when I saw what I was… was holding it. But something was there, luring me this way, pushing me whenever I turned around. And… I didn’t want to want to, but I did. Was so lost, and I've got nowhere else to go…"  _ they made the world so hard _ . "Then I thought - told myself - wasn’t right to run out on you like that. You deserve the chance to punish me. Never meant to, to leave like-" He sighed. "Knew I had to face… There’s nothing else out there. Story must endeth here. So I came. I'm weak, Buffy."  _ Always so goddamn weak when it matters. _ "Knew the evil something was pushing me here, but I still couldn’t stay away."

She was quiet, icy and unreadable as she absorbed his words.

"There were notes." Remembered them suddenly, dug through his pockets to find the slips. Presented them to her in a flurry of confetti, wrinkled little scraps of thin paper torn from the corners of textbooks. They spilt out over his fingers, fluttering like broken butterflies to the floor as her fingers flicked about catching them. Information on them useless anyway, single words in jagged writing he neither recognised nor remembered.  _ Turncoat, broken, last.  _ "It's all a construct anyway. Ghosts of my own design. They can't know anything I don't." Stop, shake head hard. Can feel things slipping like the slips. "Sorry, Slayer, gets a bit muddled." There's that bloody word again, like he's made of so much  _ sorry _ that it's overwritten parts of his vocabulary. Speak firmer, fast, before things slither again, "There is something. Beyond me. Beneath. It told me things, but I can't bleeding remember at the right times."

"From beneath you it devours," she recited, the party line and hometown slogan that everyone's learnt but no one knows the provenance of. She watched him closely as she stated it, searching for tells; he showed his empty palms,  _ I don't know either.  _ "Drink your breakfast," she said, hiding her face in her own mug, coffee coloured to a sandcastle cream sliding down her slim throat.   


He did as he was bid, using the pause to try to bring the important points back together. "The thing beneath. It might be what wears people's faces. I think. Ghosts."

She frowned to herself, eyes becoming distant. Then flicked the papers with a finger. "What do these mean?"

_ Sigh.  _ Couldn't blame her for failing to understand when he hardly knew himself what the hell he was trying to express. "I'm-"  _ Fuck.  _ "I don't know. But it - the ghost - was telling me to come here. Your house. So I'd better leave." Probably heard what he wanted to hear, formulated excuses and projected them from his own addled brain in order to brush aside the better sense telling him he had no right.   


"No. You need to stay until we get to the bottom of this. And you can't go back to that basement." Her face hardened at the end, grim hatred for her old foe beneath the library showing.   


"I could stay at my crypt. Still be in town."

Embarrassment flushed on her face, and she turned away. "You haven't seen it?" He shook his head. "It sort of… caved in. Last month. I think blowing out those supports weakened it too much, and when we had that big storm…" She blinked a few times, drawing her shutters back into place. "I'm sorry."

Well, crap. Vocabulary loss must be contagious. He lifted a hand and dropped it in a gesture of  _ nevermind _ , chain rattling. "Can find somewhere else. I shouldn't be here."

"Would you quit saying that?" she snapped, standing straighter. "Look, I'll undo those now that the loopy's left the building - mostly - but you were trying to tell me something, and I think you need to stay here until we know what's going on. If you go off on your own again now, it's only going to pull you back down there."   


She was lying, or not telling the full truth, but damn if he could work out what that would be. "If you're going to keep me here, best leave these on," he said tiredly. "Sure there was a reason for them yesterday."

"You don't remember?"

_Oh god._ What had he done? So many swirling daymares and any number of them could be fractured memories. Except, here she stood, appearing physically unharmed and not enraged with him. He lunged towards her, grabbing for her elbow at the extent of his reach. She jumped back, startled, but not before he'd felt the solidity of her, sending a chilly flood of relief down his spine. He backed away in a huddle, into the corner of the bed and into himself with carefully non-threatening movements. "Sorry. So sorry. Thought- thought you might have been _it_ again. Thought…" _Christ, don't tell her…_ He shook himself again, but kept it internal. "No, I don't remember."

She looked spooked now, sharper, though her voice was strangely soft and almost apologetic as she told him, "You insisted on it. Said you weren't safe." She quirked a false grin, "Told me you'd 'put me in the basement'."

"Looks like I have," he replied, nodding at where she stood.

"It's my basement, I can be here if I want." She twitched her head, tossed her ponytail, trying to pull the discussion towards a (weak) performance of the familiar banter-and-pout, “I might even have laundry to do.”   


He tried to play along, pull a lip up in humour; failed.

She released the pout to ask in that same gentle voice, "Can I get you anything?"

He shook his head, studying the floor to avoid seeing her face. "Think I'll try to get some more sleep. See if that straightens things out some more."   


"Okay. Sing out if you change your mind. It’s Saturday- I mean, I'll be home all day, because it's Saturday…" She snorted quietly at herself. "I'll let you- sleep," she finished, then headed up the stairs.

He waited until her head was out of view, then looked up to watch the rest of her vanish back into the light. Fuck, the tenderness in her voice. She had  _ never  _ used that tone with him. Made every other sound, sure; coulda told himself he'd heard the whole range of vocalisations she was capable of (and plenty that no one else had ever brought forth from her). Even a type of level respect, at times. That gentle, caring softness though - that had always been reserved only for her closest others, and administered sparsely even with them. He'd longed for it, a word (a crumb), a single note one day in some impossible future where she let herself feel something for him; now she was spilling whole sentences in it.   


And they burnt like they were writ with holy water, impossible to separate from the knowledge that they shouldn't be for the likes of creatures such as he. Stupid spark was doing it, muddling her perceptions, making her forget. God, he'd been so stupid. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"Hey, if she is evil, you can just chain her up in the basement next to Spike."

Xander did a spluttery half-laugh gulp thing, thrown entirely by Dawn’s coldly resentful tone. " _ What?" _ he asked, starting the word facing Dawn before whipping his head to Buffy.   


She kept her eyes on the arrivals gate as she replied. "Spike's in our basement." She'd hoped to postpone this until later; he'd arrived to take them to the airport this morning with his head full of Willow-concerns, and these things should happen in succession, not concurrently. Whatever 'these things' were -  _ Emotionally trying discussions on the return of ex-murdering friends, 1.01,  _ perhaps.   


" _ What?"  _ he repeated.   


"Spike’s in our basement." Something coiling tight inside her, she turned to his demanding face and answered in her no-nonsense laying-out-facts voice, "The school basement was making him crazy. I brought him back to ours."

"Yes, because an insane monster is the perfect houseguest."

"He's not-"   


"He is insane," Dawn told Xander matter of factly. "He talks to himself all night."

How did Dawn know? He was quiet about it - she couldn’t hear him from the hallway, nevermind upstairs - but in the deepest part of the two nights he'd been there, she'd hovered at the closed basement door, listening to him murmur apologies and self-reprimands, snicker derisively at himself and hold conversations with imagined dead. Equally pulled to go to him and to run fast in the opposite way, she'd stood frozen with her fingertips on the wood panelling and listened in silence. 

"He's not a monster," Buffy said, trying to soften her voice. "And he needs help."

Xander hissed in a frustrated breath, ground his teeth, then twitched and waved at the now empty and closing arrivals doorway. "Okay, where's Willow?"

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


The witch came to visit next. She got angry (and then afraid) when he told her she wasn't real. Kept asking him where the others were, as if it didn't know they were straight up through the floor.  _ Maybe it only sees in basements _ , he thought first. Soon started wondering if they  _ had _ all gone, voices from the living room only an illusion; perhaps they'd moved out and left him here to starve, which would be about fair. She wouldn't do that though; would have the decency to grant a clean kill. Girl still had those righteous morals to be thankful for.   


Witch snapped impatiently at that ramble - "Where  _ are  _ they?"

"They went to get you," he told her. "Slayer said. Sure you heard her, was down here after all. 'We're going to the airport to meet Willow', remember? I don't think I do. But the boy made a picture."

"Oh. I guess I'll just… wait, then. Maybe they had the wrong time." She started towards the stairs.

"Wait-" Not supposed to leave that way. But something else out of order too... "When did you die? Watcher take you to his home turf to cull you off after all?"   


"Huh?" She turned back, looked confused.

He held out his palms (jingle jangle chains-a-dangle). "Only dead people can talk to this. And one that was. That's the problem, right there. They'll think it's your fault, but it's not. It's a pity, this is. You were a sweet girl."

She frowned, then sat down carefully on the stairs. "Sometimes I think I died up there," she said, pointing. "It happened so fast…"

He knows he didn't actually see it, but imagination provides; plenty of stock images to call upon in the storage banks. Warm-hearted blonde girls seeping warm blood into pale carpeting, soft doe eyes staring blindly as limbs cool and become hard. He pulled his blanket back around, up over his head, shivers returning.   


"He did too," he told her from inside his cave. She furrowed her brow more; this incarnation of it seemed less perceptive than the others. "Spike. Different room though."

She still looked confused, but nodded anyway. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"I've got to go out again," she said, studying a pile of boxes in the corner, arms crossed tightly over the knot in her stomach. "Willow’s missing."   


She'd wanted to try to talk to him today, untangle whatever was going on with him, but duty called. Or maybe she didn't want to talk to him, and was glad for the excuse to leave. Nothing was clear this week, everything tumbled about and as foggy as the look that sometimes drifted through his eyes. The fogginess that was easier to look at than the wet clarity behind it.

"Red’s gone," he said simply.   


_ Didn't I just say that?  _ "Yes. That's why I have to go and look for her."

He looked over at the stairs, nodding the side of his head towards her as if pointing her out to someone there. "She got rid of it with the carpet. Her room now," he told them.

A little spider toe of a shiver tickled down her spine. This talking-to-no-one thing was unnerving, almost as though she were the one not seeing clearly. She'd thought he'd left it behind with the high school - aside from his private mumblings in the dark - but he was doing it as strongly as ever right now, eyes focused on the… fourth? fifth? step up from the bottom.   


"Spike!" she said, sharper than she meant to.

He looked back at her, eyes wide. "I'm listening, pet. Just hard when you both talk at once."

She swept a hand over her hair, emotional cyclones and lack of sleep prickling at her scalp. "Who, Spike?" she asked tiredly. " _ Who  _ is talking to you here?"   


He dodged her gaze, skittery again. "You are. I'm listening. I'm trying, trying to..." He gulped, swallowed, ducked his face again, anxious and afraid.   


She breathed in, out, dropping her shoulders to signal calmness as she leaned back against the washing machine. In a softer voice, she asked quietly, "Who else, Spike?"

"It's-" He looked back at the stairs suddenly, eyes narrowing and whole posture becoming sharper. "The  _ witch _ . Not dead at all, are you, Willow? Just playing possum." He looked at Buffy again and pointed to the stair. "Had me thinking she was  _ it, _ but she's only changed the channel."

"Willow?" she asked him, puzzled. Then puzzle pieces started slotting together, and she followed the line of his finger to ask the empty stair, "Willow?"

Spike lifted his eyebrows at the stairs, waiting. Then shook his head ruefully and told her (or the stairs, or both), "Nah, see, she can't hear you on the parallel station. Someone's gotta move the bunny ears or summat. What'd you do that for, anyway?" he asked the possibly-imaginary-Willow. "Scared of jail? Slayer's only got one set of chains, and they're occupied,  _ if  _ you hadn't noticed," he finished haughtily.   


"I'm not going to-"  _ chain her up. Like you.  _ Hell, she'd already been there and done that with Willow and this basement. Spike was listening to the stairs again, giving her time to rethink. "Spike." He cocked his head towards her. "Willow can hear you?"

"Not as if anyone's listening," he mumbled. Then answered, "Yeah, been talking to her. I must have two screens."   


"Okay. I need you to tell her that I'm here. No, wait… yes, tell her Buffy’s here, and she's worried about her."

"Buffy’s here, and she's worried about you," he parroted flatly. "Yeah, she's right there. You've gotta be the blind invisible one. Got to."

Moving carefully, she crossed to the stairs and reached towards the spot Spike was speaking to; there was nothing there.

"Jesus, Slayer," Spike exclaimed, sounding so much like himself that it hit her with a sharp pang of grief.  _ Slayer. _ "That's bloody creepy. Your hand's in her ribcage."

She drew it away swiftly, looking from the step to him and back.   


"Don't have to be so sceptical," Spike grumbled. "Well, alright, maybe you do."

"No, I'm not-"  _ Why am I taking the word of Mr 'I see dead people'? Perhaps because Willow’s neither dead nor exactly known for her stability. _ "I'm just confused, Spike. And worried about her."

"We said that bit."

She gave him a small smile and spoke softly. "Yeah, we did. Could you ask her what happened? If she was attacked by something? Or if she's doing a Marcie?"

"What's the score, Red? Your demons in or out today?" He pulled a frustrated face. "For fuck's sake. Did something do this to you, or have you fucked up another spell?" He tilted his head, listening, then held up a hand as if to pause her. "Nothing attacked her," he told Buffy. "Reckons she hasn't done a spell." He looked back at the stairs. "Seen anyone else, or am I the only lucky one? Insanity does that, you know." He was becoming increasingly tense, twitchy and blinky when he looked from one to the other.   


"You're doing great," she told him soothingly.   


He rolled his eyes, a short tremble running through him. "No, she saw plenty of people at the airport, got herself a taxi back here no worries. She was down here before you lot got back." He looked back to Willow. "So, you're hiding from your mates, that it? Not kind when they're all waiting for you." He sneered mildly at the stairs, and turned back again. "Slayer,  _ always  _ look behind the curtains before you send out the search party."

"Noted. Well… ask her how we can fix it. Xander and Dawn are waiting to do that search party thing. We were worried sick."  _ Crap, I sound like my mother.  _ She sighed. "Tell her we missed her? At the airport, and the other kind? And we'll get straight into fixing this as soon as she gives us a hint on where to start."

He did, verbatim. Which was slightly creepy; even the inflexion was matched, replaying her loneliness and false confidence.

"...and I really thought I was doing better- Buffy!" Willow cried, jumping to her feet as she materialised on the stairs.   


There were hugs and a splatter of talking on top of each other (which she guessed they'd been doing all morning), then Xander’s voice called from upstairs -  _ Wills? _   


"She's here," Buffy called back. With a nudge, Willow took off upstairs to find him, but she hung back, leaning on the railing to watch Spike. "Thanks. I'm glad you found her; that could have been a lot worse."

"Couldn't let her ascend when she could have been it. I'm the gatekeeper now, you know."

She half laughed, half sighed, a dry smile at the insanity of the whole situation catching her lips. "I must be the keymaster then."

He smiled back, momentarily calm and focused, and for the first time in so many months, she caught a glimpse of the Spike she'd once sat still with. The one who'd bounced phrases around like ping pong balls in the hope that she'd bat one back.   


Then he looked at the floor, hands coming in to grip his elbows and smile disappearing into the haunted look she was beginning to know too well.   


Her own smile drained away in a cloud. "Need anything?" she asked quietly. He shook his head tightly, releasing one elbow to snag the edge of the purple blanket and pull it up around him. "Thank you," she said again before leaving. "You did good."   


He gave her an infinitesimal nod.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


One crisis averted, Xander caught Buffy with a nod as Dawn went to show Willow where they'd packed her things away after her sudden departure last spring.   


Buffy stiffened as she followed him into the kitchen, shutters that had been inching open over the lonely summer now creaking closed again. He almost backed down, raised his hands and surrendered to her lead in order to preserve the fragile stasis the three of them had been maintaining, but this was too important. Guarding Buffy from her own Achilles heel was too important. It felt wrong to acknowledge her having one, wrong in a scary, shaking-his-very-foundations way, but it gaped before him all the same; he'd glimpsed her vulnerability when she'd pled with him at the airport earlier.  _ He's not a monster.  _ As if her wishing it hard enough could make it true. Whatever the hell Spike thought he was playing at, Buffy was bound to be hurt in it - she was already giving him that power, whether she realised it or not, and Spike would crush the thread of hope in her heart as easily as he'd bruised her thigh.   


She filled the kettle and set it in place carefully, her back stiff before him and face lowered, and it hit him like a gut punch that perhaps he was just about to do the very thing he was aiming to prevent.   


"Buffy…" he started, uncertain now what he was trying to say.   


"Don't," she said quietly, a note of warning to it.

He swiped a hand over his face before waving at the basement beneath their feet. "I don't like this."

"I'm not asking you to." There was a request in the words though;  _ don't make things harder,  _ perhaps?   


"He's not your responsibility. You don't have to help him."

"I need to," she said, almost to herself. She looked so very alone, remote and unreachable, full of thoughts she'd never share and secret knowledge she didn't have words for. Sometimes he thought that the more he saw of her, the less of her he knew. And the more he pushed now, the further she would retreat.  


"I still don't like it," he grumbled. "He's going to eat all the cereal, and leave dirty dishes everywhere."

She flashed him a tight little smile, eyes lowered. He dropped a hand on her shoulder for a moment, then went to help Willow. 


	3. Adrift amidst a troubled sea

** \--X-- **

  
  


Dust motes and faded bones, a tatter of fabric and the taste of desiccated air; the cave was a let-down. It wasn’t until she found it empty that it hit her how much she'd been banking on this - how much of her was running stapled together on a tiny sliver of hope that Spike’s 'ghosts' were the effect of something solidly external. Something she could fight ( _ had _ fought), something to kill, something to solve with violence and a breaking of bones. She was good at breaking things. Somewhat of an expert, in fact. All she knew of fixing things was that she shouldn't ask Willow for help.

She toed the sandy ground over with her boot again, then sat down on a flat rock. Sunlight fell in two tiny shafts from holes in the ceiling, stripes of yellow to highlight the drifting dust and blur her vision of the darkest corners. But she'd already searched every tiny cranny: no bringers. Cross the First Evil off the list of 'invisible incorporeal tormentors of souled vampires'. There was nothing else on the list. Well, nothing but 'own memories'.

Weariness dragged somewhere in her gut, mocking the waiting physical strength of her limbs. She needed to hurry onwards, walk the short distance from here to the school and her desk before anyone noticed she was late. Paste on her 'active listening' face. Listen to the students, make the sympathetic noises that were considered helping behaviour. Act like she hadn't totally screwed up her own life, and could somehow help them with theirs. Push aside thoughts of the broken man in her basement. And the glued-together witch in her spare room. And the thing coming up to eat them. And all the awful rest.

What had he whispered last night?  _ They made the world so hard.  _ There was sense in his nonsense sometimes.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


He didn't look like much. Or anything like a vampire she'd once known. Buffy had finally left her alone in the house for five minutes, and Dawn had determined to cross the barrier of the basement door and get a look for herself in private. Ask him what he thought he was doing coming here. Maybe point out how easy he'd be to set on fire right now (very easy). But even though he was obviously awake (and fairly lucid now, if Buffy was being honest), he hadn't moved when she snuck in, just sat in a huddle and watched the floor. He looked like a pile of laundry, like that time the washer broke and they'd kept piling it up in a heap down here until the repairman came. She held herself stiffly on her perch at the top of the stairs, and waited for him to do something. Anything. Ask her what she was doing here, perhaps. Then she could say,  _ What the hell do you think  _ _ you're _ _ doing here? And how could you do that to us? _

Finally he looked somewhere near her, at her feet perhaps, and asked quietly, "You okay, Dawn?"   


"Shut up," she snapped. He flinched, squinting his eyes shut.  _ Good.  _ With a surge of boldness, she added, "Fuck you, Spike." The obscenity didn't startle him like she’d hoped (and of course, why would it, he swore all the time). Instead he just gave a tiny nod, and returned to watching the floor.   


She stomped up to her room and slammed the door hard enough to echo through the house, but found the sound entirely void of its usual satisfaction. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


When Willow was nine years old, she'd imagined what it would be like when she was Grown Up. She would have her own house - stylish, ultra-modern, perhaps even something like the Xanadu showhomes. A cute little car, pastel pink with white leather seats. Xander would share the stylish home, of course, her devoted husband and best friend. Xander in the Xanadu. They would adopt a pair of Birman cats.

But most of all, the world would be her candy jar. She would have reached the stage in life where she was confident in herself, able to speak eloquently and publicly on the hottest controversial topics. She would be respected, admired, appreciated for her acts of kindness. She would be able to make her own decisions, which Xander and the other happily married young couples who were their friends would instantly see were marvellous choices. She would be in control of everything. The future would stretch out before her as one glittering coruscation of adventures, and she would sample them all. Nothing could possibly limit her.

It had never crossed her mind that permanently narrowing her choices was a possibility. Sure, things might go wrong sometimes, but they could be fixed. She could change her mind, change her major, change her career if she decided she wasn't happy with it.   


Reaching her twenties, she'd caught a glimpse of this Grown Up-ness, right around the corner. Her wings were unfolding, ready to soar. She was almost there (Xander, of course, had been replaced in the Spouse slot, childhood crush having served its purpose and been retired).   


And then it all blinked out of existence. She would never have the world at her feet again. She would never fly. Her future had shrunk to the space within the walls of the cage she'd built; to the distance between what she could do and what would destroy her. There could never be a careless choice again. There could never be an unthinking moment again. At every step she would have to hold the walls of her cage in place, trapping herself safely inside. It felt like someone had taken her Xanadu house, her Birman cats, and blown them away like so much mist. Her life had passed her by somewhere, and now she sat on the side of the highway waiting morosely for the rubbish truck to collect her instead, a whisper of  _ wait-  _ and  _ but I didn't mean-  _ caught forever in her throat.   


_ It's great to have you back,  _ they all said, as if she were. No matter. Giles had impressed on her the importance of whatever her role might be in whatever this turned out to be. Beyond that, there was nothing. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


He riled at her in scathing whispers sometimes, heaping up blame for events of last year; _What the hell were you thinking? You knew what I was - knew I didn't have a sodding clue. And you bloody well knew how I'd feel when I realised you were using me to destroy you._ Sometimes he went further, spitting hatred he could never really feel (but longed to) - _you brought me to this, here. Tore me apart piece by piece with your ravenous little mouth, drained me slowly with your forked tongue. What were you hoping to find? I didn't have it then, but your_ _inconveniently vicious dog can fetch at least, so let him lay his soul at your feet. You already hold his heart. Need anything else? A kidney, some lungs? We don't need those. Poke out my eyes, let the carrion crows descend to pick and tear at the hollows of me now that you've had your way and turned aside.  
_

She would smile then, that smugly self-satisfied grin that both sickened him and renewed his conviction that he was ranting to the correct - false - one. The attempts at hatred always stumbled and fell apart on him; could never convince himself to want to do anything other than grovel before her, belly presented and tail curled in.  _ I'm sorry,  _ he'd sob afterwards,  _ sorry sorry sorry. I've tried so hard to hate you, but it will never work.  _ Faux-Buffy rolled her eyes, unimpressed.   


To real-Buffy he spoke guardedly, oh so carefully, so many wrong paths to sidestep. Managed to reiterate that there was another thing, another evil, a ghost, and that it lived in  _ all  _ the basements - it  _ was _ the basements, maybe, or built them - but held secret the fact that it counted her face among the dead.   


The fifth night he had no visitors, though he watched the corners with wary eyes until sunrise. They didn't come again, and he couldn't decide whether to be relieved or worried.

Wednesday the chains came off, due to his inability to remember why he'd insisted on them. Comfort, perhaps; role-playing a remembered scenario in which she'd stood guard over him and for him and unassailable from either side.   


Wednesday the real shackles went on, when she asked him softly,  _ Please don't leave, Spike.   
_

_ Please  _ on her lips was a razor wire binding, carving into his dead flesh until he bit back a scream of pain. A curse word, cursing him, reminding him he'd cursed himself, a word she should not possess the need for.   


She waited for a reply, anxiety stiffening her muscles;  _ Okay,  _ he said. His own plea shouted silently inside his head -  _ tell  _ me what to do, pet. For the love of god, don't  _ ask  _ me. Never let me make you beg again. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Spike became anxious whenever she asked him to do something; her chest ached whenever she ordered him to. She didn't want to be this coldly authoritative person; the strength of her impassive face was beginning to disturb her at times. So  _ suggesting  _ became the middle ground, and it fell the same with the others; it felt like they were all so lightly held together that a nudge too hard might collapse their home of cards.

She'd bought him a couple of shirts, a pair of jeans; they loitered on the table next to the coat he wanted nothing to do with and the untouched box of bits and pieces she'd salvaged from his crypt. Suggesting he make use of the bathroom while she was at work didn't take, so in the end she did bark out orders, anger at having to do so provisioning them with force.  _ Get upstairs and shower. Throw that shirt out. Put on the stuff I bought you.  _ He nodded, and slunk off to do so.   


Clean and dressed, he seemed to find it easier to appear himself. Or it was easier to pretend he was. If she didn't meet his eyes. And no one was doing much of that lately.

Tenuously grasping for any kind of connection after the devastation of last spring, the rest of them held their tongues and traded costumes between acts. Willow wore her fluffy sweater around the house; in public there were white shirts masquerading under her waterproof jacket. Xander put on grins and jokes to taxi her and Dawn to school, and they bantered the punchlines through gloss-coated lips and a sheen of peppy slang.   


Four times that week, she picked up the phone to call Giles. Once, her hand hovered over it thinking of LA. Five times she turned her back on it and went to check that they had plenty of blood left in the fridge. Besides, Spike  _ was _ doing better. Sanity was sticking, vague mumblings replaced with sober silence. And he was sticking in turn, seeming resigned to his corner of the basement and awaiting further commands. Listlessness replaced most of the nervous twitching; his red-rimmed eyes no longer focused on invisible people.  _ Who was he, and what the hell was she supposed to do with him? _

On Friday, Xander picked Dawn up for their regular movie night, and Willow squirmed herself an invitation to join them, putting Dawn's hackles up. And, if she were honest, drawing her own claws out for sharpening. It was one thing to  _ say _ that Willow hadn't been herself and all was forgiven; it was quite another to allow her to be alone - or practically alone - with the sister she'd threatened to turn back into a green ball of energy. She hauled Xander aside before they left, then wasn't sure how to say what she needed to;  _ I know,  _ he told her,  _ I'll look after her _ . It was clear he thought she was being ridiculous, but he'd protect Dawn all the same. And Willow, for that matter. This conversation was unnecessary _.  _ She still wished she could send Spike with them. Or even tag along herself without it being obvious. After they'd left, she paced a tight circuit of her bedroom several times before heading down to the basement.   


"I need to do a proper patrol," she told him. Friday nights she usually ranged further, longer, making use of freedom provided by Dawn’s absence to check the quieter cemeteries, just in case anything had changed. And, alright, sometimes to grab a drink at Willy's. She could relax a part of her there in a way she couldn't anywhere else in life lately, respectfully ignored as she sipped her mixer in a dim corner booth, the scents of tobacco and whisky soaking into her tongue with it. Spidey senses tingling faintly at distant vampires. It was research, checking the news on the demon grapevine. Or something like that.

"Don't need a sitter," he told her.

"No, I… I wondered if you wanted to come?"  _ Crap, was this a good idea? _ There was a voice telling her he needed to get out, stretch his legs, remember that there was a world out there beyond her basement and that he belonged in it. And there was another (more cynical) voice asking whether she was just making up excuses because she couldn't admit she wanted company. Thankfully, even cynical-brain-voice wasn't dumb enough to say aloud that it might be  _ his _ company she was longing for.   


He was quiet for a long time, and she suspected the conflict and indecision on his face mirrored her own.   


"You don't have to-" she began, at the same time as he said,   
"If you wanted-"

They both stopped, lips pursed to backtrack in the awkward silence.   


When it became obvious she'd have to go first, she said, "If you feel up to it. I think you should."

"I'm not sick, Slayer," he mumbled.   


_ Except, you kind of are.  _ "Let's go then," she said instead. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


She was avoiding conflict, he knew, bypassing the centre of town to head out to the forest behind the university on a pretext of,  _ it's been too quiet over there lately. _ Probably for the best; he couldn't trust his brain to work fast enough for him to be any help in a fight, and unreliable assistance would be less help than none. She walked quickly, efficiently, until they were past the lights of the campus, then slowed to a looser wander that gave her away as not expecting trouble. He felt like a dog being walked. An aggressive one, that had to be taken out late at night so it wouldn't bite the passers-by. With a jolt of sympathy he recalled that they often wore their own electric collars, and the comparison became uncomfortable.   


She meandered through the trees, following the curved path that would spit them out at a small playground on Lairdvaile St, while he hugged the left side of the path closely to keep pace without risk of contact. Leaves rustled in the breeze, an owl called in the distance, at some point a cat bolted off into the bushes. She appeared to scan the shadows carefully for opponents all the while, listening hard and treading softly; he did the same. But if she were anywhere as hopelessly distracted as he was, they'd have had to crash straight into a demon before they noticed it. Her scent felt different in the open; not the layer of steady, insulating warmth it was in the basement, but a winding ribbon of spice that flared and danced in the cool night air, an invisible path to follow blindly.

When they reached the playground she sat down on one of the swings, toes on the ground to hold her stationary, hands loose on the chains. The swing beside her hung empty, but he bypassed it to stand leaning against one of the poles of the frame instead. Now that they weren’t in motion, the silence grew both thicker and easier, as if it were padding the space between them. As if she were cushioning the air around him. Nothing moved, and slowly some of the tightness inside him began to ease. He didn’t know what they were doing here, now, but he seemed to be capable of doing it. For a long moment of quiet neutrality - for the first time since crawling from a cave in Africa - things weren’t screaming at him. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


The house was still empty when they returned. She boiled water, put a mug of blood in the microwave, motioned for him to sit at the table. He folded his legs under himself, himself into himself, and accepted his mug with cautious fingers that didn’t brush hers. His face was closed to her lately, the raw emotions that he’d always displayed so openly now masked behind lowered lids and controlled body language, voice carefully moderated when he answered her questions. Frustration at himself leaked through when he couldn’t explain things - a flicker of tension in the muscles of his cheeks, a tightness to the tendons of his hands - but for two days now he’d been apparently completely insanity-free, and only seemed to be giving away ever less with each interaction. She sat on the side of the table at an angle to his, watching the expanse of gleaming wood between them and holding her herbal tea with two hands. She wanted to ask,  _ do you hate being here? Is this wrong of me, to ask you to stay? _ He was so cold, so controlled, so  _ hidden _ that she was afraid to ask what he felt towards her now. Apathy hinted with his shrouded eyes, making her itch to scratch at him, shake him, demand  _ feeling _ from him, some shade of himself from him. Which would be a very bad idea. They’d so nearly been destroyed that way already. _ (Nearly?  _ hissed a sceptical and scathing inner voice).   
There were just so very many things she didn’t know anymore. All she could do was feed him, and watch him indirectly, and wonder what lay inside him now. Who he was now. What lay between them now. Between the guilt and the shame.   


He took his mug to the sink and rinsed it carefully before putting it in the dishwasher, and she looked at her own cup to see that it had cooled to lukewarm while she stared at the table. He passed back through the dining room on his way downstairs, and she stopped him with a whisper of his name, then didn’t know what to add when he paused. “I don’t know…” she tried to explain.  _ Anything.  _ Theme of the week.  _ Something  _ was coming, everyone knew; something big, she knew. Perhaps overwhelmingly so. It felt like they were all on a timer, a countdown, their moments numbered. And he was a part of it, but she couldn’t see how to help him, or anyone.   


He took one almost-step back towards her, a hesitant little shifting of his foot. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured. There was something there in his tone, but as she looked into his face to try and catch it, he turned to the floor again. “Whatever it is. You’ll beat it.” His voice was soft, but there was no guardedness to it now. He spoke the words as unthought facts, as if reminding her that the sun would come up in the morning. Perhaps he was.

“Thank you,” she whispered, but he was already slipping back to the basement.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"Popcorn, Willow? ...Fanta?"   


_ We know what you liked, but you have changed. Does the girl who blew up the Magic Box like Skittles? Will you go off the deep end if there's a gunfight in the movie, a magic spell, a warm-hearted and soft-bosomed woman? _ Their thoughts were all over their faces. She told Xander to get her the same as Dawn.   


She received popcorn doused in ketchup, and a nervous grin; was he risking humour? Of course he was. This was Xander. He who faced the worst the world could throw at him with an arsenal of terrible jokes and silly references, because he often felt like the biggest joke of all. She took a piece of popcorn and licked the sauce off with a defiant grin.

The movie was animated, free from dodgy topics and adult themes. A band of unlikely allies made a journey of self-discovery; a sabertooth squirrel quested futilely to eat an acorn. The others had already seen it, but before she could apologise for her copious sensitivities limiting their choices, Dawn was insisting they catch the final showing of it next week too. The teenager forgot herself in the swell of feeling brought on by animation, forgetting to put on her cold shoulder again until they got home. Then it was a warm goodbye to Xander and off to her room without a glance in Willow’s direction.   


She'd expected Dawn’s hatred for attacking her. Soon after arriving, Dawn had put her straight that it was the abandoning which was unforgivable.   


Buffy loitered in the entryway, "Coffee, Xander? Cocoa?" She picked at the edges of her shirt and flicked her hair back,  _ I wasn't concerned at all. Everything's great.  _ It was the delusion they were all working hard to maintain.   


Xander turned down the drinks, and after an awkward and tense exchange over whether it was okay to leave (and a studious ignoring of both the basement door and any mention of patrol), he said his goodbyes. Something about Spike was a taboo subject in her presence, she'd immediately noted; Xander was overdoing the protective older brother-ness, and his blasé dislike of Spike had hardened to an intense disgust that boded ill when set against Buffy’s unspoken steely defence of the vampire. A dead part of Willow wanted to offer Buffy a shoulder to unload all the goss for what had obviously been more than just 'sleeping together' last spring; a bigger part was glad for once for Buffy’s tendency towards privacy. Willow had enough of her own pain to carry.  _ That's where Tara stood up for me on Buffy’s birthday. That's where we kissed the day she wore that purple skirt. That's where Tara brushed her hair, played cards, sat walked danced smiled laughed  _ **_ lived _ ** _.  _ That's where Tara _ was. _

  
  


** \--X-- **

There were dreams, in the nights, dreams she'd chased all summer and into this balmy autumn; empty Sunnydale streets with winding wet scarlet ribbons along their curbstones, empty roads with embers glowing below the grills of their storm drains. She got the symbolism,  _ really, guys, _ got it loud and clear and couldn't the all-knowing mystical dream-senders send her something more useful than 'the hellmouth is heating up' and  _ 'there will be blood' _ like the subtitle of a b-grade horror film? Like, novel idea here, how about this time they could just  _ tell  _ her what she needed to do to set things to rights, and she could thank them and get on with the doing? (She'd tried to say as much, standing on yet another dreamscape footpath one night, but had about as much success as ever at unscripted shouting in a dream - which was to say, none.)   


Giles and his witchy contacts were as much with the helpful; direst of murky warnings, vague to the point of obscurity. Sharpen your knives, lace up your boots, evil forces are… doing something. Spoiler alert: it's probably something evil.

She could feel it in her office, the barest whisper of a low-octave hum in the air.  _ Hellmouth.  _ Stronger than it had been the week before, her own distraction then notwithstanding; strong enough by this week's end to prickle the hairs on her arms when she arrived for work. Something stretching, mumbling, preparing to awaken. She'd considered asking Willow to come down and analyse the sensation, but the last thing she needed was a side trip down insanity lane for the timorous little nuclear weapon that was her friend. So she sat at her desk with her feet on the humming pulse of evil and wondered what she should do when it inevitably sped up.

By nights she scoured the town for clues, asking first and staking later;  _ what's going on?  _ If anyone knew, they weren't telling. The demon population was unsettled, on edge, quick to snap and quicker to punch. When she popped into Willy’s (for a genuine news update, this time) he told her there’d been unprecedented levels of random fighting in the place. The fledges she came across seemed fiercer, wilder, almost desperate in a way, and other than the same old promises, gave her nothing but snarls and dust. She combed the forests, the cemeteries, people’s lawns, ever watching for dead foliage; she found nothing. So she waited, senses primed and a heavy certainty in her bones that soon enough they’d all be wishing they were still unaware.   


Willow picked up a part-time job at the university library, after discovering she couldn’t re-enrol for anything until the next semester. She was eager to contribute board, buy groceries, chip in for the bills;  _ pay. _ Dawn was eager to milk her for all the guilt-cookies she could. And still had Xander on Guilt Popcorn Fridays, or maybe it was Lonely People Movie Night. The three of them had each nudged her to join them tonight;  _ take a night off, go later, come see…  _ whatever it was, she'd lost track.  _ No,  _ she'd told them, as she had Dawn and Xander all summer.  _ Another time.  _ Friday nights were hers.   


Saturday mornings she'd inevitably feel guilty for her freedom of the night before, and then Dawn would receive guilt-pancakes too.  _ Chocolate sauce, Dawn? Maple syrup, peanut butter? Blueberry jelly, that's a fruit, isn't it? Do I feed you well enough, is your body image healthy enough, you're not reading fashion magazines are you? You're growing so tall and that is just not fair, and you're growing so self-possessed and I don't know if that's a good thing or not, and are you making friends, are you popular, are you  _ _ happy _ _?   
_

And over every moment hung the spectre of Spike. He haunted the house, silent and cautious, doing his best to avoid everyone. His hands lived in his pockets; his shoulders cowed and cringed with invisible weight. He would accompany her on patrol if she asked; otherwise he just… sat. Silently. Staring not at invisible people now, but off into his own thoughts, thoughts he never shared and she didn’t dare pry into. He did do the washing though - she’d left a pile down there one morning, and came home to find it washed and dried and folded waiting for her. Her thanks had made things awkward - more awkward - again, him shrugging it off and staring at the wall to say,  _ it’s nothing. _ It wasn’t though. His stillness was too intense. He'd watched her from the corner of his eye as she gathered it up and pressed her face to the fluffy jumper on top, clean and sweet-smelling and soft on her cheek, and his face had softened to match it, something like relief and gladness flickering past. So she’d begun leaving things around before they all left for school and work; dishes in the sink, her sheets on the washer, the vacuuming half-finished. She would come home to find things done as if by magic elves, take him a mug of blood, and say,  _ thank you, Spike _ . He would shake his head, or shrug, and stare at the wall some more.   


Was it helping? Her blood offerings, her ploys to let him be helpful, her thanks? It all felt both hopelessly inadequate and yet too close for comfort. Words kept whispering through her memory;  _ it's what you wanted, right?  _ They were still too big, too unfathomable.  _ I didn't want this,  _ she whispered back in the safety of her bed one night.  _ I didn't want us to all be lost and alone together. _

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"Why am I here?" he asked on their third Friday night dog walk.   


"We're patrolling," she said, deliberately obtuse, watching the path ahead.

"Not  _ here  _ here. Why are you helping me?"

"You need help." Stated simply in a tone that left no room for argument.   


He would make room. "Alright on my own now. Oughta get out of your hair."

"No." Between the soft voice and the stubborn set of her jaw lay a hidden uncertainty; when he didn't reply after a minute, she asked, very quietly, " _ Am _ I helping you?"   


_ Was she? _ God, how could she question it. She was all that held him together. Her presence in the house kept everything away, flooding his perceptions until the only thing he saw was her, even with his eyes shut. Through the long hours that she was gone he would start to lose himself a little again, shuddering at the weight of memory and startling at nothing, berating himself for staining her life with his haunting of the basement and telling himself again to insist on leaving that night. His hands frightened him, the sunshine excoriated him, and he could almost wish the ghost's return to offer distraction. Then she'd appear, that navy mug held forth in offering, and everything would be swept away in a blaze of  _ Buffy.  _ She would retreat upstairs to make dinner, potter around the kitchen, make small talk with Dawn, and he would sink into an exhausted sleep, protected from the terrors of the day by the rhythms of her footsteps and the cadence of her voice through the floorboards.   


But it was wrong. "You shouldn't be. I could never deserve it."

"You could never…" she echoed weakly, face twisting as she trailed off. She stopped and turned to him, tossing her hands up as words tumbled out. "Christ, Spike, you got your  _ soul  _ back for me. What am I supposed to do with that? People don't  _ do _ things like that. I could never love like that. It's too big." She crossed her arms over herself, outburst fading, looking like she regretted saying so much.   


_ But you do, luv. You do it every time you stand up to fight.  _ "You don't have to do anything, l- Buffy. This was my choice. It's not your problem." He carried on walking, hurrying from the rebuttal she was sure to be preparing; she matched his pace. "Didn't come here to show you. Woulda kept it to myself if I could've. Know how you bloody pick up responsibility for anyone with a soul, so I was damn well not going to let you be manipulated by mine. Claims your narrative over- over what- happened, doesn't it? You oughta be staking me for that, not bloody  _ helping  _ me."

"And if I want to?" she asked, querying but firm. "With the helping, not the staking."

"You can't, Buffy. It's not right."

"Says who?" she bristled.

God, this was it. He had to put an end to this madness, to taking advantage of her weakness with his own. He stepped in front of her, too close to her, squaring off and glaring down at her, doing his best to intimidate. "Says anyone with a lick of sense!" he shouted into her face, a rush of horror at himself chewing into his gut and twisting his expression. "I'm bad news, pet, or have you forgotten? There's  _ nothing _ good here," he spat. "Nothing to save. Nothing but pain, and bloodshed, and horror. That thing, the thing down there, it  _ wants  _ you to help me because it knows that's how you'll be destroyed. So stop trying."

She stood mutinously silent and unbudging, until he finished shouting and held himself panting down at her unflinching face. Then her eyebrows drew down, the green in her eyes hardening to jade and the aura of power around her narrowing to a knife-edge of focus. When she spoke it was with immutable, lethal calm. " _ I  _ decide who I'm willing to help. Who I offer it to. Not you. Not  _ it. _ Not anyone else. Me. This is me, claiming my narrative. You going to tell me I can't?" He was struck dumb at her words, frozen mid-pant by her sheer force. "Are you?" she demanded, and waited until he managed to shake his head slightly. "Didn't think so."   


She stepped back, releasing the overwound wires between them as she turned away. Looking out at the dark forest, she said softly, "I need to help, Spike, if I can. Don't make me carry this too. Let me give it to you. If you won't take it for yourself, accept it for my sake."

The words he needed to refute were bound too tightly to the rest of them; how could he throw back  _ help  _ and  _ give  _ without also denying her  _ I need  _ and  _ I choose?  _ He was, god help him, as utterly helpless as ever to deny her anything she asked for herself, and her softened voice would bring him to his knees if she said any more. How did she do this, twist on a dime from an unbeatable force of nature to someone so vulnerable and unsure? He ached to comfort her somehow, to go back to the time when he could have rested a hand on her shoulder or stroked her silky hair; actions unimaginable now.   


There was something he could do, though. "Yes. You are helping," he said quietly.   


She turned her eyes to him, hope and uncertainty mingling in them. "Yeah?"

_ Oh, luv.  _ She really had no idea. She was the golden beacon his mind clung to in an endless black sea, and completely oblivious to it. "You don't have to do anything," he said. "Can work the microwave fine by myself. Just… knowing you're around. That you'll be back. Helps."   


She searched his face for a few seconds, smiling gently when she seemed to find what she was looking for. "And you don't have to do the housework," she said quietly.   


"Does it help?"

"Yes."

"Good," he said, and felt his own smile creep out to answer hers. He swiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, a gesture that was becoming automatic habit lately. Her own hand twitched slightly as if to reach for him, but she remembered herself in time, stilling it by her side before they both took a step away to continue walking.   



	4. A bear that baes like a lamb

** \--X-- **

Spike was avoiding him, as if out of sight could mean out of mind. Xander collected the girls for school and work, for movies and the supermarket and… when he ran out of things, he hunted for more. It's Sunday, Buff, shall we go to church? A Sunday drive, Willow? The mall, Dawn? Come out of the house, my friends, let me chaperone you away from him. I haven't seen him, but I know he's there. He's the invisible carbon monoxide seeping up through the floor, and I need a task a purpose a distraction a something to scorn below beyond myself.   


Work's good, Anya; they've promoted me, they give me money, I'm saving it like you taught me, they give me problems that require concentration, they give me physical labour to weary my body.   


Works badly, Anya; when I sink into my empty bed at night my tired brain is wide awake, my tired arms still search the space beside me. They can't understand why you're not there. I don't know how to tell them.   


How did you get your soul, Spike? Do you think there's one at the store for me? I'm saving up my dollars, but I don't think it's enough. (I don't think I can save my friends. I've already jackpotted my luck there). Yours won't stop you hurting her; we've all done a great job wounding each other with ours. It's just a better grip for you do it all over again. Worse.   


The hollow in me is more heart-shaped anyway. It's the empty space inside my bed, the eye of the cyclone inside my head. But there's no coming to grips for me. My lost organ lives in an apartment across town that I drive past every day and can’t ever find. When she held out her heart for me, I ran away. Now all I have is the space that would have been filled by it.   


I despise you, Spike, and I envy you. And sooner or later I'll have a chance to show you the first one in person.   


At work Xander watched himself digging day in and day out over the roof of hell, and worried about what they might find under the earth here. At home Xander felt his lungs moving in and out with the numbly innocuous empty air, and worried about how to tackle Spike.   


Then one sunny Monday morning, they found the bones. Just one, at first, in a hole where they were sinking foundations for a standalone building to house music classes.  _ Please let it be some overzealous dog's long lost chew toy.  _ Who was he kidding; this was the hellmouth, and he could never be so lucky. The bone was followed by two more, these ones bearing a band of dull metal loosely around them; possibly a bracelet of some kind. Work was halted, the bulk of his crew took off to the bar to celebrate the unexpected free afternoon, and Buffy arrived to furrow her eyebrows at the scene before the police could get in the way (he'd called her first).   


She wiped dirt off the bracelet with tentative fingers and a couple of Espresso Pump serviettes unearthed from her pocket. It was a nondescript silver bangle, with no evidence of mystical carving or significance. She cocked her head at the bones, agreeing they looked like a human ulna and radius; "But how would I know? I should have brought Daisy with me to compare."

"Daisy?" he asked.

"Daisy. Our friendly educational skeleton from the science lab. Seems to pop up all over the school."

He absorbed that, then had to ask again, " _ Daisy _ ?"

Buffy quirked a grin. "Yep. But there's a petition to change it to Boner Lisa?" Grimacing, she amended, "Second thought, I think that might be worse."

He snickered. "Gets my vote. So, we stepping back to let the mortal authorities deal? Wil should be able to grab their report once they file it."

She nodded slowly. "I guess so. Nothing particularly wiggy here."

"Tell that to the guy who found them." He glanced over at the trailer where he'd told Danno to wait; hopefully he wasn't using emotional upset as an excuse to raid the beer fridge. "Did you want a ride this afternoon? I don't know how long I'll be stuck once the cops get here."

"Nah. Dawn’s out until dinner, so I thought I might drop in on Willow and walk back with her."   


He nodded, smiled; she said goodbye and walked back to the main school building that housed her office. The police arrived, talked to him and Danno, then ordered them both off site for the rest of the day.   


Walking to his car, he checked his watch and realised it was only 11am. He had a whole afternoon free, a key to Revello, and everyone else was busy. It was time to talk to Spike. 

  
  


He found Spike in the kitchen, a tea towel discarded on the bench behind him as he leaned back against the sink, waiting. His eyes tracked Xander’s entrance warily but without surprise; he must have known this was coming eventually. Xander felt his lips twist into something part sneer and part baring-of-teeth.

"Help you with something?" Spike asked in a careful monotone.   


He scoffed, mood darkening. "What do you think you're doing here, Spike?"

Quirking an eyebrow, Spike lifted a hand and dropped it onto the tea towel by way of explanation. "Dishes, just now." He visibly loosened his stance, grinning smugly as he added, "Can we make this quick, boy? I've got washing to put in the dryer."   


Xander stepped closer, blood rising at the smarmy bastard's casualness, at the sly,  _ deceitful _ lack of direct eye contact. He'd been right; Spike hadn't changed one iota. "You need to leave, Spike, before I make you."

Spike huffed a derisive snatch of laughter, shaking his head. "Yeah? Well, you're not the one in charge around here." He rolled his eyes, flickering them past Xander’s face, then added in a low purr, "Slayer likes the way I fold her panties. Says-"

Xander saw red. The fist he didn't know he'd had ready smashed into Spike's cocky mouth before he'd finished speaking, hard enough to knock him to the floor. Taking a step after him, Xander booted him viciously in the kidneys and again in the face before the explosion of movement ended as abruptly as it had begun. Somewhere inside, a voice was asking in a screaming whimper,  _ What the fuck are you doing?  _ From another place came a chilly sense of vertigo. Spike always did know how to bring out the worst in him.

"That all you've got?" Spike asked, managing to make a wheezing breath sound mocking. He'd stayed where he'd fallen, hands limp on the floor as he goaded Xander again, "Go on, pup, surely you can do better."

_ Waiting for it. _ "Yeah," he said, taking a step back. "I can." Unclenching his fist and stretching out his fingers, he spat, "I hate you."

Spike sighed and dropped his head back against the floor, staring at the ceiling in pained resignation now that further violence didn't seem to be forthcoming. A gash on the edge of his eye socket oozed blood, making him squint on that side. There was a reason Xander wore his steel-capped work boots on patrols. "You should," Spike said quietly. "You all should… I've tried to tell her." The last sounded despairing.   


Xander looked over from studying his bleeding knuckle. Unheeded tears were mingling with the blood on Spike’s face, threatening to drip pink spots onto the floor while he lay there looking far more beaten than Xander would ever be capable of. Xander picked up the tea towel that still lay on the bench and threw to him.

Spike shook his head, sitting up awkwardly to toss it back. "It'll get stained. Pass me the dishcloth."   


Xander did, then turned on the cold tap to run his hand under. Two of his knuckles bore clean little slices, like he'd put his fist through glass.

"Sorry," Spike mumbled, without a trace of insincerity, sitting with his back to the cupboards and knees pulled up while he dabbed off the pink. "Vampire. Sharp teeth."

_ Jesus, did he just apologise?  _ Xander sighed. "Guess I should know that by now." He turned the tap off and dried his hand carefully.   


Spike climbed to his feet and came to stand beside him to rinse out the dishcloth. "Nothing happened here, right?" he said, low and serious. "Had myself an accident on the stairs, if she asks."

Xander’s stomach flipped nauseatingly. "No," he breathed; he wasn't sure what he was saying it to. "No," he said again, firmer. "Don't lie."   


Spike glanced at his face finally, watching him through narrowed eyes for a fraction of a moment.   


_ Don't say it.   
_

Spike didn’t. He nodded, bruising lips pressed together, and wiped the sink dry.

Those scuttling, downcast eyes were back in place, and Xander prayed they'd stay that way; if he ever had to look into them for more than that fraction of a moment, he might not ever be able to sleep again. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Spike had a black eye. Or at least, a pale blue, lilac and pink one, the colours mingling out across his ivory skin from a graze on the edge of one cheekbone. He looked like he'd been kicked in the face. When she asked, he told her it was nothing. When she asked again, he said, "Don't worry about it. Won't be happening again." At her continued Firm Look, he sighed and added, "I asked for it. Was stupid. It's resolved." Grinding her teeth, she let it lie for the night.   


When she saw him the next morning, Xander had bruised knuckles and a pair of tiny blade-sharp cuts. He didn’t want to talk about it either.   


Outside school Dawn climbed from the car, looking back at Buffy in question when she didn’t move to get out. "You go on," Buffy told her. "I need a word."

"Whatever," Dawn grumbled, rolling her eyes. "Like I want to be seen with you anyway."

Was she hurt? She flounced off towards the main entrance with her chin lifted and feet coming down snappily; she was hurt. It didn’t seem to matter how many conversations they had, how much slaying involvement she got, Dawn remained impossibly sensitive to any hint of being left out of anything. She was as determined to be their new scooby as Buffy was to keep her safely in her own peer group. Although, looking at that peer group filtering towards the school… perhaps she should be looking into far-away nunneries instead.   


But first, Xander. "Look," she started, raising a hand to forestall his earlier fob offs from resurfacing. "I don't want to hear it. Spike told me that whatever happened between you two is over and done with. Is that true?"   


He watched his hands resting on the bottom of the steering wheel for a moment before turning to face her. "Yes. There's no secret vendettas being sworn, Buff. It was just a moment of stupidity that won't be replayed."

"Good." She sighed to herself. How much to say? "Something's coming, Xander-"

"The hungry underground, yeah yeah."

She smiled. "Yeah." The smile faded, and her voice shrank on her. "It's going to be big. And I'm going to need all the help I can get. We all are."

He nodded, support in his warm chocolate eyes. "Like I said. It won't be repeated."

"Thanks." She picked up her bag and climbed out.

He leaned over to catch her ears before she shut the door. "Buffy?" She paused. "Things have always been coming out of the ground to eat us," he said with a wry grin.   


She snickered. "This is true. Have fun bone hunting."   
  
  
  


Up the stairs to the main entrance, and here it was. The deep bass humming that never paused - and was it stronger again than yesterday? She suspected so. It felt like a swarm of bees were tunnelling up from below the school. Giant mutant bumblebees, à la H G Wells.  _ Buy fly spray, _ she muttered.  _ Enough to arm the whole school.  _ No one else seemed to feel it, except… absenteeism was growing. Fighting was becoming a growing problem, beyond the expected 'we've been at school a few weeks and have identified our rivals'. There was a tenseness, an irritability, a mood of defensive snark to the air.   


Giles hadn't returned her latest call. Spike couldn’t remember what he'd known. If he'd known anything. Willow was a sombre little mouse. This sitting and waiting for the enemy to appear was not her modus operandi, and her own irritability was starting to itch beneath her skin. Tomorrow, she told herself, she was going to bring a flashlight and start exploring the basement during her lunch break.   


But then, she met Cassie.   


Cassie Newton, sixteen years old and convinced she was going to die on Friday night. Gently spoken and apologetic; her calm acceptance of her supposed fate made Buffy want to shake her. She wished she could share more with her:  _ The universe said that to me too. And yeah, okay, I did. But here I am, five years and how many apocalypses later, still breathing, still smiling. _ Still fighting. Still bleeding and bruising and hurting. More alone than ever. At least she'd got better at putting on the smile.   


Principal Wood asserted that she'd done everything she should, he'd do everything he could, but, "We can't know what's gonna happen… we just do what we can."

Only, she  _ did _ know what was going to happen. And she  _ could _ do more. Time to rally the troops.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"So," Dawn said, plonking into Xander’s passenger seat after school. "Heard you beat up Spike."

Xander pulled a face, turning his hand around on the wheel so his knuckles faced the dashboard rather than Dawn. "That’s not quite..."

"Lemme guess. You  _ tried  _ to have a go at Spike, but he rolled over and started crying?"   


Xander blinked, then twisted his expression into one of reluctant agreement. "Pretty much."

"Yep," Dawn said glumly. "Not much fun then, is it?"   


Xander sighed, doing that thing where he tried to work out how to sound more adult-ey when he was practically the same age as her. Just because he'd finished school and had a job and stuff. Dawn huffed out of her nose and crossed her arms.   


"I didn't-" he began carefully.   


She flapped a hand to shut him up with the moralistic explanation. "Have you been to see Anya yet?" she asked brightly instead.   


"I told you. The last thing she wants is to see me."

"How do you know that if you haven't tried? I mean, she undid that worm thing, and we haven't fallen into some trippy alternate universe full of eunuchs, so obviously she's trying not to cause problems for us. Besides, wouldn't she go away somewhere if she didn't want to see you? It's only a matter of time before you bump into her at the supermarket. Do vengeance demons go to the supermarket? I mean, do they eat people food?"

"Yes-" Xander said.   


"Thought so. They're practically human. Just with extra powers. Like the invulnerability. That's perfect for a relationship partner around here, with people always being attacked and kidnapped and stuff. Ooh, and teleporting, that would be so cool to have on the team."

"She's not invulnerable."

Dawn shrugged. "Close enough. Do you think she'll get fired soon though, if she's not filling her gralloching quota? She taught me that word. I've been waiting for a chance to use it in English class."

Xander considered for a long moment, looking uncomfortable. Then changed the subject. "What's the scooby meeting for?"

Ha. Buffy hadn't even told him yet. Dawn had been given her mission immediately and was performing it excellently, if she did say so herself. Besides, it wasn’t hard; Cassie was really friendly, and interesting. She started filling Xander in on her discoveries. 

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Harris brought the bit-  _ Dawn,  _ home alone. Xander's feet followed hers inside, keys clunked onto the hallway shelf, the front door closed behind them. Standing in the middle of the basement - where he'd frozen in his pacing circuit - Spike tilted his head over further, ears tense.  _ Where is she?  _ Dawn’s schoolbag thumped to the floor in the dining room, then she swung open the fridge door; the daily quest for snacks. Reassuring in its normality.   


"We should have stopped for doughnuts," Dawn's voice called out. "It's, like, the law. Tradition. Scooby meeting equals doughnuts."

_ Scooby meeting?   
_

"Not when they run closer to pizza time." Xander.   


Dawn was quiet, probably weighing the options. Then the fridge closed. "Okay. I'll get the menu."

Both sounded casual, unpanicked. Eager, even. Buffy must be okay then.   


Willow joined them from upstairs (Dawn went silent) and asked the question for him, as if she'd heard it projecting from his brain (maybe she had) -  _ Where the fuck is Buffy?  _ "Where's Buff?" (she forgot the emphasis).

"Had to stay to see the counsellor after school." Xander again. "The official counsellor. The one that's not her. Something about protocol. Said to start without her."

More questions. Chairs scraped back, Willow's laptop came out. Discussion shifted to:  _ Cassie Newton. What do we know?   
_

Half an hour later, her feet finally sounded on the porch. Front door, handbag set down (quietly, all quietly, not like her featherweight elephant of a sister), a greeting called out, and then she was into the kitchen - fridge, microwave, kettle. Was she hurrying?  _ Please do.  _ The over-long day's anxieties made him want to hasten her, hound her, fling himself at her feet on the doorstep like a frazzled dog; it was unfair on her (nevermind ridiculous), and left a sort of spinning untargeted anger careening through his thoughts. He castigated himself for needing her, but couldn't not.  _ Things  _ would come if she didn't soon, ominously looming their way along the ceiling rafters, invisibly waiting. Choosing their marks on him, finding the buttons to press. He didn't know what the power was she yielded before them, only that her presence wiped them from existence, barred them access to his space for a time. Didn't need to label it to have faith in it.   


"Hey," she said in that disturbingly soft voice, coming down the stairs at last. "Sorry I'm la-"

"No!" he shouted before he could stop himself, startling her, making her flinch back slightly, only slayer reflexes saving the mug she held from sloshing over onto her fingers. He cringed back too, stepping back, from the shout, from the flinch, from the sudden feeling that the  _ things  _ were still watching from the distance and attracted to his tone, had to draw them back, away. "No, no," he whispered, layering softer chords into the air, crooning at it again when the sound didn't seem to bring harm, "no, no, hush. You don't need to… don't say that, luv." The name fell off his tongue from old habit, and he snapped his teeth together behind it, twitching again at the snap-sound. So  _ loud _ , he was, so violent-tongued and rude, full of sharp things and whiplashes.

Buffy was silent and still for a moment, then continued down the stairs slowly. She swallowed, licked her lips, eyes watching him from around corners only. "Here," she said in her own crooning voice, holding the mug in front of her with both hands as she made her way closer.   


"Sorry. Yeah," he said inanely, straightening himself on his feet somewhat with an effort. "Heard you- case to investigate, yeah? Gotta, um, there's the meeting upstairs now an' all."

"Yes." She held out the mug, and he took it with his fingertips carefully, like he always did, afraid of the day he would inevitably reach too far, too fast, too eagerly, and the cup would fall and shatter and stain everything with blood, his horror on display and no longer constrained by the white porcelain she kept it so well contained in.   


Her hands dropped to her sides once they were free of their burden, and she glanced away and back to somewhere around his shoulder. "There's a girl," she said quietly. "She might be in danger. She thinks-" Buffy paused suddenly, shooting a quick look at him with a different type of consideration. "She said she knows things that are going to happen sometimes, like, precognitively."

She was waiting for something, but the puzzle was too well riddled. "Cassie Newton?" he tried.

Buffy smiled in a gently encouraging way; wrong answer, but it was good he had tried. "Yes. Cassie. She thinks she's going to die on Friday. We need to find out how to put a stop to it."   


_ Poor Cassie.  _ She would die. They would all die. Sunnydale, California, civilisation. All gobbled up.   


_ Not helpful.  _ He swiped at his eyes with his free hand, tired dampness looming under them. "You need me to- to come read stuff?"

"No, it's okay, you get some… have a nap or… we've got it for tonight," she settled on. "I mean, if you want to do that. You could come up and put the TV on or something…" she trailed off, clearly at a loss; he very much avoided the upstairs when anyone was home.

"Yeah, um, think maybe I should. Sleep," he said ruefully. "Just a bit… tired. Today."

She nodded slightly. "Let me know if… I can do anything?"

_ Because you haven't got enough to take care of already?  _ Hell but he should have kept it under wraps better, wrangled himself better when he heard her arrive; she was going to worry now, when he wanted her to start realising she'd done too much already and he was just fine and dandy these days. He had to get out of here, away from her, find a pit to crawl inside and hold his stains in.

He nodded back, and sat down on his cot carefully. 

** \--X-- **

There were school reports, medical files, a website about psychic warnings. Buffy flicked through pages with one ear trained to the floor, until the pizza arrived and she grabbed the opportunity to slip away and tiptoe back to the basement stairs.   


Spike was asleep, as she'd suspected he would be. Curled up in her purple blanket again, only a shock of white hair and part of his face visible. He didn't so much as stir when she snuck in, looking utterly (fittingly) dead to the world, but she had no doubt he'd be up and twitching again if she snuck the other way, from the house and off anywhere. He'd been trying to hide it, and failing miserably; he only ever seemed to relax enough to sleep when she was awake and nearby. The unexpected delay this afternoon had been too much for him, clearly, bringing back the shying at corners, the jumping and the startling at himself, the suspicious glares at his own hands. He'd looked exhausted, and terrified of letting her know, as though it weren't obvious in every taut line of him.

There was more softness to his features now. Not as she'd seen on him in the distant past, with his comfortable sprawling and dreamy smiles; nowadays the tension never quite left him, and the smiles didn't exist. But softness all the same, an incongruent sense of vulnerable innocence. She put it beside the broken lines he recited in an entirely different accent, beside the cries for  _ mother _ , beside the tiny hints scattered through previous years, and wondered anew who William had been. What soul they'd torn from… what kind of soul they'd burnt into Spike. What it brought with it; what it had uncovered that he needed to hide inside the blanket. What had Anya seen, that night in the Bronze?

Anyway. He was asleep now. And she had research to get back to. (She would have to create a contingency plan before the next time she was late home; could she ask Willow to- no, Willow had issues of her own enough to contend with, was uncomfortable in herself with being here alone too long. Maybe she should get Spike a cellphone, so she could at least let him know… or so  _ he _ could call  _ her _ … but the number for hers was on the hall phone, and he never had, though she'd pointed it out and told him he could- ...later, she would solve this later.) 

  
  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Xander was staring down the snack aisle, trying to decide if he needed any, when Anya stepped around the far corner. She carried a basket on one arm, a list in that hand; she was tapping her lip with her index finger while she pondered the list. Looking up, she froze in place, and he watched her expression flash through surprise, hurt, anger and longing before settling on haughty unconcern as she spun on her heel to go back the way she'd come.   


_ Dawn said I'd see you here, _ he thought distantly _. _ "Anya, wait!" he heard himself say, surging forward to go after her.   


With an audible sigh Anya stopped in place, her stiff back to him and her shopping basket held tightly against her side. Halfway down the aisle towards her he faltered, his feet slowing to a crawl as he realised he didn't know what he'd been going to say if she did wait. Only… before she'd noticed him she'd looked uncomfortable; distracted and worried. She was probably about to curl her lip up at him disdainfully and teleport away, but he still had to…   


"Are you okay?" he asked, stopping a couple of yards behind her.

Anya sighed again, then turned around to face him with a short tap of one foot. "Well done, Xander, you made it all the way down the cookie aisle," she said petulantly, before dialling it up to a more scathing level of snark. "Maybe if we'd held the wedding in a bakery you'd have made it all the way to the counter."

Xander sighed himself, looking away at the nearest shelf full of cookies. A sort of dull tiredness dragged through him, and he lifted one heavy arm to pick up a packet of peppermint cream Oreos. Anya's favourite. With hot chocolate, on worknights. "I was just wondering if everything was alright," he told her flatly, then reached out to drop the cookies into her basket. "Have a good night."   


Anya jerked back slightly as he reached forward, her eyes shooting down to the cookies as they landed on top of the microwave meals in her basket. He didn't wait to see how she'd respond, dropping his still-empty basket on the nearest rack of them and walking quickly for the door.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"Thursday. Sixteen hundred hours," Xander said into an imaginary walky-talky as Dawn sat down in the car, following it with a  _ krshh  _ of static-sound. "Relay your progress report, Officer. Over."

Dawn smiled. From anyone else she'd be insulted at the suggested childishness, but when Xander did things like this it made her feel more mature somehow, like she was the friend that would let him indulge his fun side without teasing him for it. "Cassie prefers green ballpoints to blue, Fanta to Coke, and she lent me this book she just finished," (actually, Cassie had told her she could have the book, but Dawn had insisted she would give it back when she'd finished, and then changed the subject quickly when Cassie smiled that eerily sympathetic little smile again). "She's still saying no to the dance,  _ and,  _ she told Tracy Chapman to choose the green skirt on Friday."   


Xander made the walky-talky  _ krshh _ sound into his hand again, somehow making it sound both sad and hopeful.

Dawn rolled her eyes and raised her own imaginary radio to her mouth. " _ Krshhh.  _ End report. And that's  _ Sergeant  _ Summers, buster." She put on an accent gleaned from the cowboy flick they'd watched a few weeks ago, "I fought a lot of men to get where I am today. Over."

Xander grinned and nodded his head once, commending her performance, then put the car in gear. "I saw Anya last night," he said idly as he pulled onto the road. "At the supermarket."

Huh, guess that was a point to her for precognition. Perhaps she should start making vague predictions to people, see how easy it was to luck out often enough. But… "What was she doing at the supermarket  _ here? _ Wasn't she always complaining about having to shop in  _ Sunnydale  _ without her teleporting powers? I thought she'd be collecting tomatoes from Italian street markets and champagne from… Champagne, or something. Did she seem like she was hoping to bump into you? Did you talk to her? What did she say?"

Xander huffed a breath out through his nose, watching the road closely. "The only 'hoping to bump into me' she was doing was the kind that is not. Give it up, Dawn."

_ Well jeez, you were the one who brought it up _ . Dawn pouted at her own half of the windshield and crossed her arms over her chest. If Anya was ever going to hang out with them again Dawn was clearly going to have to do everything herself. No one else seemed to care that she'd been  _ pushed  _ out, except Xander, who was doing a useless job at talking to her. Maybe Anya needed a woman-friend to ask her over, for a girl's night or something. And then Xander could just be there. And everything would turn out happily, like some badly-written sitcom, and they'd all eat popcorn and laugh and the hellmouth would spew out unicorns and fairy dust. Yeah, no. Give it up, Dawn. 


	5. Help

  
** \--X-- **

"I've lost Cassie!" Dawn squeaked through the phone, sounding on the verge of tears. "She was right here- but this guy distracted me- I think-"

"Dawn," Buffy cut in with a voice of steady command. It was what she had, at last:  _ command _ of the situation. Something finally looking up, last-minute save in hand. Tangible butt to kick. "Not your fault. And it's okay, I know what they're planning."

"You do?" she asked anxiously.   


"Oh yes," Buffy said, a dangerous note of cold anger sliding into her voice as she studied the boy -  _ Martin _ \- sitting glumly on the other side of her desk. "And I'll be putting a stop to it."

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Party-crashing, sacrifice-cancelling, just another regular Friday night outing on the hellmouth, Buffy said. Movie night slash long patrol rescheduled to tomorrow.   


"I'll come with you," Spike said. "Few of these guys, yeah?" Pack of them, cutting the girl off from the herd, running distraction on the bit. Coulda hurt her. Going to hurt Cassie.   


"...Yes," she said slowly, "teenage boys.  _ Human  _ teenage boys. Sorry, I know Friday nights are…" She didn’t seem to want to label them either _.  _ "But we'll get out there tomorrow. You'd better sit this one out."

The human/chip issue was half smokescreen, he knew. He wouldn't need to physically touch a bunch of kids playing at demon leashing to put the fear of hell into at least half of them. No, her real reluctance came from the fact that she'd killed four vampires while patrolling with him, and he'd made contact with exactly none of them. Each time, she'd leapt forward to dust them with quicksilver speed and an absolute minimum of wasted movement, while he could only watch, uncertain whether she was worried he  _ couldn’t  _ fight in his current state, or if she thought he  _ shouldn't  _ be doing so; shouldn't be giving expression to the brutal creature that he always was under the skin. Didn't really know himself if he could or should. Didn’t want to be that. Be this. Didn’t want to risk her relying on him in a situation where his failing could see her get hurt. But he wouldn't fail. Was still the monster, vicious and violent, these teeth and those hands that knew killing and tearing better than anything.   


And he was going to lose any chance of swaying her if he sunk any deeper into himself right now. "Can still help," he said. "Lookout, backup with the scary face, something." He risked a look at her eyes, focusing steadily on them for a moment. "Let me help, yeah?"

Buffy dropped her gaze first, a look of uncertain consideration creasing her brow as she studied the basement floor for the umpteenth time. Spike ducked his head with relief the instant she did, an uncomfortable tingle coursing through him from the connection of looking so closely.   


"It's in the high school," she cautioned. "Library."

Of course it was. "Better than the basement."

"Okay," Buffy said eventually. "We leave at eight."

  
  


The school was full of heebie-jeebies, prickle-cackle things under the skin. No time for that now. Job to do.   


Slayer was playing deception, red-robed and face hooded as she left him guarding the hall and slipped into the library (bleeding idiots if they fell for it, but then that was obvious already).   


Aforementioned bleeding idiots soon burst into yelps and high-pitched shouts as she revealed herself, her voice singing through them with all the peppy confidence it had lacked to his ears for a long time; "Do you  _ know _ how lame this is?..."

_ "That _ lame demon?" the leader of the bunch asked suddenly, smug triumph in it.   


Grumbly growling, the rank scent of cinders; demon showed after all, then.

A whimper of fear from the girl, a hiss of irritation from the slayer. The whimper sparked him,  _ go, _ into the library, things simple now. Girl was on the ground, frightened, dirty hands grabbing at her. His were faster. He was at her in a blink, punching the boy away, flinching from the jolted reminders,  _ bad-bad-bad mustn't do hurt, _ but no zaps to his hands and them clear about their business.   


Fighting happened, then the boys were subdued and the demon was in pieces and he was cutting Cassie free of the bindings. She turned to him afterwards, looked at him, looked  _ into  _ him, freezing him with the  _ seeing _ , a weak flutter of… want, maybe, something, aching inside him as he waited for her to speak what she saw.   


"You'll have it," she said in a soft, slightly sad little voice. "When it's needed."

The aching intensified, became raw and painful and consuming, and he broke to scuttle away from her, back into the safety of the shadows behind shelves. _Mustn't, daren't,_ this searing sharp thing, gibber over it and bury around it because it was dangerous, dangerous to have-allow-acknowledge-show, and there were so many things all crowded inside him already, too many, so **loud** inside the shell now and no wonder everything was cracking-

  
  


Snap of a bowstring as Buffy led Cassie out, a  _ swoo _ of sliced air, a slap of skin as Buffy’s hand closed around a crossbow bolt in mid-flight; booby-trapped doorway. Lurking tension, snap, snatch... a little  _ crunch _ as she broke it in her palm. Too fast in the loudness and he shivered again, nails scratching weak and faster at the carpet to go through, get down there somehow where this would all go, girls were okay now and speaking calm sounds and leaving this wrong place by the right door.   


" _ Cassie!" _ Buffy cried out, a desperate sound, a denying sound, a hurting sound, bringing him bolting to her.

And Cassie was on the ground, and Buffy was in tears, and none of it made sense.    
  
  
  


He knelt down beside them, cowed and shaken, made small by the encompassing weight of death. A different aching inside now, bruisy and gulpy, hurting, full of hurting for this moondreaming girl who saw too much and now too little, for her airy melancholy and the purple tips on her hair.   


Buffy looked at up him, right at him, eyes wide and shimmering and asking silently in a broken plea,  _ why? _   


He moved without thought, a hand reaching to cup her small shoulder, round and hot and vibrating with energetic life against his palm while Cassie lay still and dead on the floor. "I don't know," he whispered, his own face wet again,  _ again,  _ always uselessly drenched lately but okay this time because it was right somehow for the inexplicability of it all. "I'm so sorry, luv."   


"Me too," she whispered, sniffled.   


This, then, was what he had lacked before Africa, pouring through him now, moving him to touch and her to allow it- he shouldn't. Pulled his hand away carefully, cautious of jostling anything in the waves of bewildered hurt and goneness. Cassie's eyes stared at nothing where a minute ago they had seen everything, spark-less now and yet still hers, all of it sudden and senseless and empathy a crushing, grazing thing.   


"Spike!" Buffy said loudly, twitching him to turn to her, to startle back to wider comprehension. "Spike," soft now, softly breathed, "I've called the police, they'll be here soon. Do you want me to ask Xander to pick you up?"

She was holding her phone, sitting back a little, eyes dry and face closed again. Not her first roundabout, steps to follow, everything locked away and practicalities first.

"Yeah…" he said vaguely.  _ Yeah, I hear you. But I don't understand.  _ "Buffy, I…" Wanting to say,  _ I didn't know.  _ But that wasn't true, was it? Knew what death looked like, smelt like,  _ tasted _ like; hadn't cared. God, it hurt  _ so _ much, and how could Buffy be so strong? She was opening her phone again, so he shook his head hard, hoping to jar pebbles into a line of speech. "No. I'll, I'll wait-" Was it him? Must have been, dead thing bringing death here, Cassie's fingers on his skin and catching the taint there. Should not have left the underneath. "No," again, discarding the thought to wait for her, the urge to put his hurting alongside hers. "Not Xander. I'll walk. Run."   


"Are you sure?" Concern there again, scattered all around, anxious tones as all the pressing issues leaned in at her. "Are you okay to?" A little wince of apology flickering on her face; that she had to ask, for the doubt.   


"Yes. Yeah, be fine. It's okay,"  _ I'd doubt me too. _ Her too worried, so many worries, and him one more, ten more, overflowing handfuls more… "I need to get back there. The blanket. Won't get lost," he explained as sanely as he could, urging her to relax on this front.   


She still looked dubious, but she watched him leave without argument. 

  
  


_ Get back to Buffy's basement.  _ Things had been okay there. Or, better, anyway. Only, they weren't now. The deadness hung around him like a shadow-coat as he snuck in, and what had he been thinking, coming here, staying here, leeching from her? Taking, taking, relying on her strength to protect him from himself, his deeds, his his his. Should take it all away.

Had promised not to leave though. Long ago and far away it seemed like, but he's broken so many promises and so many things that any more might shatter everything, bring the world down in pieces.  _ On the soul-having side of it now, boy, _ and everything's more breakable there.

(she trusted my word when she shouldn't have, when I didn't know how far she did. Girl really believed i wouldn't truly hurt her, and, god… so did i)

"Soon fixed that, didn't ya?" Angelus snickers with that lecherous, disparaging laugh of his.   


Don't really mind him so much; right in a sense that he should be here to tell me what latest I've done wrong. But wrong that he should be  _ here _ , and she'll be back soon. Need to get him gone afore then. ( _ Don't pay them any mind, William, and they'll move on. _ ) 'S what Mum used to say, knowing i was too damn soft to stand up for myself in the schoolyard. Hunted them all down later, course, but back then they were as untouchable as Angelus here. Shoulda minded her better. Too late now. Lifetimes too late. How many? Been wondering. Wishing i knew. Glad i don't. Know I should. Can run the maths, use averages; entire population of Sunnydale and a whole lot more, dead and buried beneath my tooth and claw.

Ponder this for a time, and when i look up i realise Angelus has indeed got bored and buggered off.  _ You were right, mum. _ Too late to thank her still.

"Hurts, don't it?" Wilkins says through a chuckle; and why is everyone laughing tonight? And asking, always asking these questions that weren't. "Such a relief when I signed over mine."

Is that what they want? What's a soul worth on the underground? More to this somehow than the deserved punishment. Ulterior motives, twisting the plot. Doesn't feel safe, so i curl into the blanket, determined not to answer them; think of poor Cassie instead and the things that are clean and simple like a razor blade. Hold onto the sharp fresh pain of tonight, because it's the easiest to be in.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


She put her excuses, her lies, her pleas for explanation to the sombre policemen who came; there were answers to the last when Cassie's mother arrived. Buffy left soon afterwards, carrying the explanation home to be passed around.  _ Heart condition. Hereditary.  _ Dawn was heartbroken in a different way, and no one found any sense or solace in the medical facts.

Once Dawn and Willow had tucked themselves into bed, she tidied up the kitchen, straightened the dining chairs, drifted through the house with her body full of weary restlessness, the driving need to  _ do. _ Checked upstairs, lingered for a moment in each doorway to watch her charges sleep. Finally she tiptoed downstairs to do the same there, sinking down to sit on a basement step and watch the fluffy-blanket-ball that was Spike. Or not-Spike. But the closest thing she had. (There was an anger balled up amongst the scattershot of emotions she'd been denying, anger at him for leaving and for making it so that he had to and didn't he know she'd  _ needed _ him? Had, would,  _ did _ , and he'd taken himself away and given her this in return. And then the this in her basement would crush the anger down into shame, because wasn't this her creation? Her own twisted artistry of destruction; perhaps she had too much in common with Angelus after all.)

"I'm so sorry about Joyce," he said suddenly, startling her from the repeating swirl of unresolvable thoughts. His voice was slightly muffled by the blanket, just enough to soften its frayed edges.

"I thought you were asleep," she blurted out, then flushed inwardly at how overtly startled she sounded. He might not even have been talking to her; hell, maybe he  _ was _ asleep, and dreaming. With the spacing and the wild-eyed look he'd had at the school earlier, she wouldn't be surprised at either.   


"No," he said softly, then edged the blanket down until his face was revealed, all deep shadows and moonlit planes, one cheek pressed into the mattress as he lay curled on his side. "Just thinking." He sounded so weary these days, dulled down, as if all those decades of wild exuberance had caught up at last. Which, she supposes, is exactly what happened. (Angel's guilt had seemed such a noble, honourable thing to her teenage self, almost romantically literary in its way. She hadn't tasted the genuine article on her own tongue, back then; couldn't imagine what it was like to look back at your own actions and recoil as they dug their rusty barbs through your belly. And she'd never slaughtered her way through even a single orphanage. Older and disillusioned-er, she now knew enough of guilt to know that she couldn't begin to imagine his.)

She adjusted her position slightly, resting an elbow on the step behind her to settle further into place.  _ What were you thinking about?  _ Should she ask, did she want to know? Would it help to tell her? She was full of questions no one had answers for. Roll back to the beginning, then; he'd obviously wanted to voice that. "Me too. About Mom." There'd been strange, unfair little flashes of anger in that direction too, at times, a child's anger at having been abandoned. Chased by shame for feeling them, then guilt for her possible part in it (it wasn’t easy, having her for a daughter. Never exactly stress-lowering). Normal reactions to loss and grief, all the supposed-experts said, but knowing so did nothing to assuage the emotions.   


Spike's eyes watched her through the dimness, a rawer, more open expression in them than she was used to seeing lately. There'd been a moment there at the school earlier, a brief intensity of contact; both of them tumbled out of their defences by the situation and grasping onto the other to try and right themselves. She could still feel the echo of his fingers on her shoulder, the faint tremble that had been in his palm.

"I didn't mean to hurt her," he said, solemn and still, his broken-glass eyes beseeching. "I didn't know, Buffy. Really didn't."

She frowned, tracking back, trying to find where the wires had crossed. "You didn't hurt Mom," she told him, then watched confusion spread, lessening the grip of his attention on her in the here and now. That was where, then. "Never, Spike." The corner of her lip lifting slightly at memory, she added, "She sorta liked you."   


For a fraction of a second he looked like he might echo the hint of a smile, then he dropped his eyes to the floor, his air of regretful sadness only deepening.   


Frustration welled up tiredly inside her, bitterness and exasperation all out of sorts with the rest of her emotions. If he'd only been asleep… then  _ what? _ She could have sat here and pretended someone understood how she felt tonight? That he was still her Spike, holding a dark place for her to hide in when things were getting on top of her? No. The frustration drained as quickly as it had risen, leaving her with her own vague feeling of regret. She shouldn't have risked taking him with her this evening, should have foreseen the effect things going wrong could have. Yet, for a moment there in mid-battle he'd been… more. Motivated, focused, almost… assured. Not Spike of old, but neither the Spike of the past few weeks.   


And now he was back to the strangeness and the wallow of self-recrimination, and possibly muddling her mother's death up with god-knew-what, as if he didn’t have enough guilt of his own to carry and was scoping the streets for more to lay claim to.

"Mom… it was just one of those things." (Keep saying it, to remind yourself.) "Sometimes people die and it isn't anyone's fault."  _ Like Cassie.  _ She'd be running circles on that for a while, she knew, searching for the place she should have acted differently, for the wrong choice she'd made that put this guilt on her; all while knowing rationally that she'd done everything she could. And she was all sane and long-term soul-having. "Spike," she said quietly, waiting until he looked up nearer her before continuing, "you did good tonight. Things were looking iffy for a moment there, until you burst in. What happened to Cassie, it wasn’t your fault. No more than it was mine, or Dawn’s, or Xander’s."

He searched her face carefully, then seemed to accept the words, glancing down again with a grimace of apology. "Sorry. Gets confusing. Hurts."

"I know," she whispered. Strange to acknowledge it in herself so openly, accustomed to holding it aside and away as she was. The answering pang of it in her own heart, the raw simplicity of,  _ it hurts. _   


His eyes travelled back to hers, and slowly the regret and apology in them was flooded over with… she'd have said concern, in the past, but this was different - he was different, and the look in his eyes was different too ( _ soulful?  _ she wondered on some level). Reflected pain, in those crushed-glass midnight eyes. Something being mirrored, probably far too clearly to be comfortable for him at the moment. "Buffy," he said in a voice much closer to his usual one than she'd heard since the conversation had begun. His head came up, alertness spreading through him. "You alright?"

"Yes," she said, turning away to study her knees. "I just wanted to… sit, for a while. I don't want to bother you."

"You could never," he whispered, fervency touching his expression for the briefest moment before he shoved it under with a hard blink. He looked like maybe he was going to say something else, then lowered his head back to the mattress silently.   


She tried to smile in a way that said,  _ yes, go to sleep,  _ unsure now what she had wanted in coming here. Something she had no right to ask for. Something she'd clawed off him over and over until it was all hers and he had none. Yet here it was again, in his limpid eyes watching her across the room. He lay with his body cringed and curled, pressed down into the thin mattress like a worn-out, broken thing, but those eyes whispered something else: if she asked it of him, he would  _ make _ the strength to get up, to take up a guard post on the stairs and let her rest instead. He was still here, and he would give and give and  _ give _ until he was gone. Her own strength flared back, eclipsing the muddle of guilt and anger and worry, simplifying. "Get some sleep," she told him with an easier smile, and (bizarrely) found it on the tip of her tongue to add,  _ luv. _ Or maybe not so bizarrely; if she knew anything of safeholding broken people, she had learnt the best of it from him.   


He echoed her smile slightly, gave her a half-nod of obeisance, then dutifully closed his eyes.


	6. Clarification

** \--X-- **

  
  


_ Spike has a soul. _ The too-bigness that had hit her like a runaway circus truck in the church that night was finally stationary enough for something of it to be comprehended.  _ Spike  _ has a  _ soul.  _ She may have been repeating it to the others for weeks, but the words had been in a foreign tongue until tonight. The stranger in her basement was Spike, with a soul. Spike who had  _ asked  _ for a soul. Spike who had looked at her across a million miles of white tiling with absolute horror on his face as the truth smashed home - and then made a decision.  _ To be the kind of man… to be a kind of man.   
_

It felt as though she'd seen three swirling shades of him from her perch on the stairs earlier. Traumatised innocence in those lost baby-blue eyes. Painfully throbbing empathy when he'd looked into hers. And something buried down under both, down at the core of him, a smouldering coal in the heart of him that would burn there until all of the rest became ashes on a breeze: impossible, indefatigable  _ love. _ He was still Spike. And if there were new, unmet corners inside of him, there were also places where he understood her in ways that had been out of reach before. He was changed, as were they all. But still there.

She burrowed deeper down into her duvet, cocooned in the peculiar muted hush that fills the last hours before dayspring's approach, turning her thoughts over quietly in this safe, private space of less-than-full reality. If Spike was still Spike - and she'd known this, inside, known it long before the surface had settled enough for her to look through to it clearly - then he was also the same man who had shattered her unwilling trust in him. Who she'd spent the summer silently raging at. And missing. And worried for. (Despite all the very logical reasons she'd given herself not to). Her own abuses cluttered the basement where she'd shoved them, so many more sharp-angled shadows around him, and she couldn't be sure, even here, from her safe bed, if she was really strong enough to move them. Or whether it was wise to. Or  _ proper _ to want to. But she'd never led with her brain. And her heart was already extending a shoulder, blindly yet surely, offering itself in support while he tried to pick an untrod path through the debris.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Pale, pre-dawn light blued the room when he awoke, just beginning to fade the yellowish glow of true night's streetlamp-through-the-window look. The stairs where Buffy had sat were empty, the night before almost dream-cast in its impossibility; dewy spider's threads the only connection between what had somehow passed between them in the dark, and the clarity of this morning.   


New day. Seemed newer than the previous ones, as though waking at its birth had changed it. The dew-drops not exhausted tears today, but tiny crystals of something valuable.  _ Hope. _ Not for happy endings, or sanctification (he was insane, not delusional). Nay, hope glittered in its tiny specks with a wind-song whisper that he was here because she had need of him, and that when the time came there would be something he could do to help her. Crystal-bright and crystal-sharp and he'd been right to fear it last night when it swelled up; hadn't someone once said even a little hope is a dangerous thing? The comfort of pressing yourself into the ground was that there was nowhere left to fall. But the problem with pressing yourself into the ground was that it rendered you useless in a fight. And one was coming.   


Time to drag himself upright for it.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Buffy and Willow were in kid slippers today, all with the solicitousness and over-consideration. Like she hadn't ever known anyone who'd died before. Like the people around her didn't drop like flies.  _ Mom, Buffy, Tara. Buffy-bot _ (and that one she'd never be able to list aloud without being derided for it, but the bot been her friend, dammit, with her ever-present cheeriness and nonsense jokes, and been a person, albeit an invented one, and no one else had even seemed to notice she was gone),  _ Justin, Cassie.  _ Or just leave.  _ Dad, Spike, Anya, Willow.  _ (Riley had hovered near that list briefly, but he was a giant douchebag and good riddance). Buffy got a second entry somewhere around 'wanted to leave' or maybe it was 'tried to'. Second, third, whatever. Who was counting. No, she was used to this, and brushed off their concern with some fib about planning to meet Kit at the mall.   


Once out of the house, Dawn second-thunked her excuse and wondered what Kit was actually doing today. She fingered the cellphone in her pocket briefly, playing with the idea of texting her to find out, then let it be and set off walking for Main Street. Best not to go looking for company. Be blasé. Indifferent. Let friends come or not, not like she cared.

That determination sustained her through two hours of idle shop-browsing, utterly lacking in anything piquing though it was. She should have angled for some spending money before she left, used the opportunity provided by guilty-Buffy to double-dip on her allowance. Except it would have felt wrong. Callous. Stupid  _ feelings _ . Still, she had a few dollars left from last week. Espresso Pump?   


The Espresso Pump was about half-full; a few couples bubbling with airy chatter over Saturday brunch, single people here and there sipping tea or coffee over newspapers, notebooks, laptops. And at a corner table, staring vacantly at the wall - Anya. Dawn paused halfway to the counter, netted by indecision and incomplete ideas. Anya didn't seem to have noticed her. There were plenty of empty tables; she could claim one and give Anya a casual  _ hello _ and wave-off if their eyes collided. Or she could leave. Anya had a box on the seat nearest her, the sort of oblong, shallow, lidded thing people kept files in. Maybe she was meeting someone, waiting for some kind of vengeance demon work meeting?   


The man at the counter picked up his order and brushed past Dawn on his way out the door, and now the barista was looking at her with mildly impatient expectancy. Tilting her chin higher, Dawn moved up and ordered- she'd been thinking hot chocolate, before she stepped inside, something to wrap her palms around and kill time over with a side of people-watching. Reassessing off the sense of indecision, she asked for a caramel thickshake in a takeaway cup, freeing her from any requirement to stay put here until it was finished.   


Thickshake in hand, she straightened her shoulders and approached Anya's table. "Anya, hi!" she chirped, aiming for bright and casual.   


Anya looked up from the teaspoon she'd been dragging through the foam on her coffee, frowning slightly when she recognised Dawn. "Oh. It's you." She dropped her attention back to the spoon, lifting it clear and tapping it on the rim to try and clear the foam from it. She looked kind of tense; not in the mortal-danger way, more like… the look Mom used to have whenever Buffy got in trouble at school. Dawn watched her in silence for a long moment, until she looked up and said with puzzlement and familiar bluntness, "You're still here. Have they asked you to spy on me?"

_ That’s me, still here. _ "No," Dawn said, and seizing upon a decision, sat down in the seat opposite Anya. "I came to get a drink."  _ Crud, what's a conversation starter that's not spy-ey?  _ At least tact was unnecessary - unwelcome, even - in present company. "I'm avoiding going home yet. So how are you?"

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


Buffy picked up the dirty plate Dawn had abandoned on the table, listened to the sound of Xander’s car pulling out of the drive. She ought to thank him again, for this, for the steady reliability of him through the summer and into this glooming autumn, for the one night every week that was hers to be herself in and Dawn’s to be reassured in. Willow's inclusion on movie nights no longer seemed to prickle up Dawn’s hackles; if she wasn't exactly welcoming Willow along, she also wasn't quite pushing her away. Progress? Progress.   


The back of Buffy's neck fizzed up its alert -  _ approaching vampire -  _ pitched and toned to a familiar key. That much hadn't changed, even if her response to it was in flux. Carefully setting down the plate she still held, she stood waiting until he appeared in the kitchen doorway, then flickered her eyes over him quickly. He still held himself with that ill-at-ease heaviness that was usual lately, but she hadn't imagined or projected it earlier - it was definitely different today. Less like he was simply too weary to do anything other than what he was told, more like he was actually agreeing with it. As though he were bracing back against the weight pushing him down, rather than submitting to it. The expression on his face paired too; something firmer in the set of his jaw, a slight lift to the shape of his eyes. He was trying. She smiled at him, and got a hint of one in response.

"Ready to go kill stuff?" he asked in a quiet, hesitant rumble.

"Yep." Perky, be perky. Encouraging. And it wasn’t hard this evening, with this sense of gradual steadying inside her. Of things maybe being all kinds of messed up in every direction, but the damage done and over with, the dust settled and clean up slowly commencing. What was left in the rubble she was yet to find out, but her gloves were on and she was heading in with determined optimism, dammit. "I thought we could cycle through the main cemeteries?" she ask-offered. "Beat-cop for drunk teenagers and opportunistic bloodsuckers?" It broke the routine of sheltering Spike on half-bogus 'patrols', but after the everything which had made up last night, some instinct was nudging her to do so.   


"Good with me," Spike said with a nod.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


He hadn't felt too certain about the idea when Buffy voiced it, but when they came across a pair of half-drunk fledges fighting over a bottle of cheap wine the encounter went better than he might have expected. He dove forward to block and hit back as the first one charged, Buffy zigzagged around him with a stake ready, and twin clouds of dust exploded to her quipping  _ don't whine about it. _ She shot him a confused and maybe slightly irritated look afterwards - what  _ had _ he leapt out in front of her for? - but a second later she'd covered it smoothly with a grin, slipping her stake back into her waistband. Okay. First scuffle down, and he had neither lost the plot nor been a dangerous hindrance.   


Doubts and dark thoughts dogged at his heels as they carried on walking, menacing smoky whispers trying to draw him back into the harsh realities - the sharp distance he was holding to keep from unintentionally hurting her, the very wrongness of him being here - but he refused to turn his attention to them. There'd be time enough to think on them later, when she was tucked up safe in bed; right now she needed his attention focused on the mission at hand. Compartmentalise. He could do this.

A growling sound in Shady Hill Cemetery turned out to be coming from an upset Chunh’erl demon, which shuffled away at the sight of them. Given that it was harmless to all but small rodents, they watched it go in peace. In Restfield he took in the crumpled hollow of masonry that formerly was his crypt, broken chunks of stonework jutting up through the overgrown grass to almost reach the surrounding ground level. Buffy’s face grew sad, regretful and apologetic and strangely almost mournful, all of which were bad, so he shrugged lightly and carried on walking, leaving her to catch up. It had long been only so much rubble.

At the gates they came across another fledge, this one spitting the line at them as it attacked;  _ From beneath you… _ Buffy pinned it to the grass and attempted to shake out answers, then made a frustrated sound that he’d once have snickered at as she staked its answerless self.

“And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,” he told the patch of dusty grass, earning him a flash of suddenly keenly attentive green eyes. “Fuck. Sorry. Means nothing, ‘s just something I read once.”

She huffed a short sigh, but chased it with a crooked smile that said her frustration was with the whole riddly scenario, not his false clue, and sheathed her stake again. “Read where?” she asked idly as they started walking back towards Revello Drive. “Because it’s more than I’ve found to go on.”

_ Tell her… _ that once upon a distant time, a boy called William dreamed of capturing his love in lines of such beauty that they would stand immortal while Time ravaged all else to dust (and that his 'love' then marked him a thing beneath, and he was the only one immortalised that night). Tell her that it was that boy's desperate desire for love that led to… and that she should never have looked for the man in him. Tell her that another William once succeeded where he had failed, and thou art fairer by far than this autumn eve. No, tell her, "Some book of classic English poetry at the watcher's. Nothing mystical." Well, no more mystical than any other verse.   


Buffy pouted out her lip. "Ah well."

  
  
  
  


Knowledge came back in a thunderbolt, jarring him from the edge of sleep to his feet in the middle of the room.  _ The thing beneath.  _ How could he have forgotten? He almost tore off upstairs to shout it at her before he forgot again, but caught up to himself in time to stop at the base of them. He knew  _ too  _ much now, some of which she absolutely could not afford to. Momentary excitement draining away through the floor, he sunk down to sit on the bottom stair and buried his hands in his hair as he tried to wrap his brain around this.

It thought it could corrupt her, drain the goodness from her, nibble things away from her until surrender looked inviting enough. It knew where her strength came from, and sooner or later it would target them. If it could break her beliefs, make her turn her back on the world, it would be safe to continue growing. It didn’t know who it was dealing with.

But neither could she know how to counter it. No wonder the bastard thing hadn’t been concerned that he might figure it out; the solution was unthinkable. It was here because she was, grabbing a toehold of reach when the slayer population doubled that distant night in batface's cavern. Ever since her mantle passed to Kendra she'd been out of the natural order, untethered by rites of mystical succession, a loose cannon of besouled demonic energy fighting the darkness but belonging to no one. Slayers were created to die, she was  _ prophesied _ to die, and every day that she refuted her destiny and her demon-bound soul fought for the light, the evil clutched a space for itself in turn. To balance things, she'd have to die. Properly.

Unless someone could stand in.

But how? It seemed the very height of conceit to think of offering his own belaboured soul in place of her shining one, an insanity that would only cross a mind insane itself. And it would probably breach the slayer's righteous moral bottom lines about the value of human souls were she to allow it. Willow, though, she had  _ Power _ now, power enough to argue with higher forces. Power enough, perhaps, to barter a deal. Would she go behind the slayer's back? Yes, if it would save her. No, if it would be too great a betrayal for their friendship to withstand. Yes, if she thought Buffy would never find out.   


And then there was her. This, then, was the other reason he'd not wanted to come near her. Buried in the back of his brain had lurked the secret;  _ make sure she hates you. Make her want to, make her glad to use you.  _ She could never have loved him, he understood now, but she couldn’t help  _ caring,  _ and care spoke silently from her every action since the day she’d dragged him out of the school basement. All the sparks were hers to protect. He'd told and told himself to keep his distance, but all his noble intentions fell away in her presence. Since understanding what it meant to her to give it, he'd been accepting more and more of her help with cautiously opening palms and a confused but glad smile when it seemed to bolster her in turn. His stupid fault, dumping it on her in the church, her who was Chosen to feel responsible for everything. Should never have bloody told her he did it for her. Should at least try again to explain that he'd done it for him, because of her; that it wasn't her fault.   


But forget that for now. How the fuck was he going to convince Willow? She'd been kind to him since her return; too embarrassed and ashamed of herself to question anyone else's actions, too oblivious to what had gone down around her while her eyes were filled with Tara to hate him for it. He'd wanted to tell her sometimes;  _ I've heard what you do to men like me. _ But it wasn't his place. Bad enough Harris had betrayed Buffy’s privacy like that. Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. Was there a path his thoughts could take that didn’t run straight to her? Stupid question. Rhetorical question.   


So. He could tell her what it was trying to do to her. That this was a campaign of deconstruction, of stripping away, that it aimed to bring itself inside of her. Tell her about the chanting, the blind priests who called it forth - hadn't she said something about looking for eyeless guys in robes? Tell her everything but why it wanted her kept alive. And he could look for an opportunity to put that part to Willow… No, do that first. Maybe they could sort it all out without Buffy ever having to know it was anything to do with her.

  
  
  


The witch was reluctant. Hell, he had an ominous sense of foreboding about the whole idea himself, but that was only natural given the stakes. Add in the shade of committing betrayal that kept hovering at the edges of his vision, and the mental breathing space of the last few days became a vanished dream out of time. But he could deal. He would.   


Anyway, Willow had agreed so far as the preparation, ordering supplies and offerings and whatever else she needed to open a dialogue with higher forces. Shame to drag her into the dirty business, though when he'd said as much she'd firmly shot him back;  _ Balance, Spike, you're right. It's what I came back to try for.  _ And atonement, clearly, which she seemed to think she could find in this task. Almost told her it's a fool's lie, but maybe not for her.   


Now that he knew again what the plan was he chafed against the waiting, but the postal service had no special consideration option for 'items needed urgently to assist in sacrifice to save the world'. Let slip on the belabouring of guilt then, and keep reminding yourself that an end is nigh. Find that there's comfort in knowing an end is nigh; calmness descends with a soothing whisper that soon you can take this all away from her and yourself with it. Watch greedily of her face, listen hungrily to her step, breathe deep of her scent which fills this her home. Plenty of time to castigate yourself later for this despicable selfishness now; an eternity of being hauled over the coals for it around the bend (demons only fall one way, and he won’t unlive without this burning spark again). She eyed him curiously whenever she caught his new intensity of attention, and he smiled with closed lips to turn her away; he hoped she'd forgive him this one smallest of his transgressions.

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


The following week the evil-vibe in her office felt yet stronger, Principal Wood seemed to be watching her with an almost creepy sort of philosophical musing, and a group of students were sent to talk to her after getting in a bizarre fight in the cafeteria (hellmouth or hormones, she couldn't make out the facts well enough to be sure. But that was fine, because she was a multi-purpose counsellor and ready to help with either scenario, if they'd only let her, and she was trying  _ so  _ hard to help).   


On the home front, Dawn appeared to have somehow become Anya's advocate, confronting her sister with a series of arguments for why they should recruit the vengeance _justice_ demon as some kind of righteous white-hatted version of her kind; Willow had been swallowed by books and her laptop and a sudden energetic burst of research (good thing or no - again, not enough with the facts). And Spike was… she wasn't sure. Peculiar. Peculiar-er. Watching her whenever he thought she wasn't looking - and occasionally even when she was - with a calm steadiness that looked unnatural on him now. Not that he shouldn't, you know, be calm, but… it was too much of a sudden contrast to the weekend, last week, the ones before. _Suspicious_. She'd asked, angled, fished for explanation; nothing. But it unnerved her in a way she couldn't quite put her finger on, until she was watching him in turn. Had even taken to listening surreptitiously at the basement door again whenever she could, half expecting to hear him talking to someone.   


With all the watching-and-being-watched going on in every direction, her senses felt frazzled and twitchy by the end of every day and refused to turn off when she climbed into bed. Oh, and her officially-titled watcher still hadn't called.


	7. If I swallow anything evil

** \--X-- **

Dawn skipped into the kitchen, saw him unexpectedly there, and flounced out again.   


Buffy gave him a wonky, apologetic smile, but he shook his head to it. 

"It's right of her."  _ Don't start blathering on about how you're an evil, betraying demon again, slayer's sick of listening to it and never hears _ . "Someone ditches you like that, only wise to them hold to it," he fumbled through instead. Still couldn't quite reconcile how he'd already managed to drift so far from the bit last year before that final awful severance, and glad she, at least, remains scornful of him.   


"Hey," Buffy said, those doe-soft eyes blinking up at him suddenly, terrifyingly earnest and hopeful. "You came back, Spike."   


Came back came-back-came-back and,  _ oh god,  _ she wasn't speaking for Dawn now, not with that look on her face.  _ Shit _ . This, then, was what he'd done, let himself be driven to- no, fuck that, own it: what  _ he'd  _ done, made an example of himself,  _ here, slayer, this is the sort of creature that won't abandon you for good, take it in because it's all you'll get-  _ Angel knew to leave her for her own good but oh no, not Spike, selfish prick- Except that was wrong too, removing her agency, deciding her decisions for her, leaving her heartbroken again at her voicelessness…   


The undercurrent of  _ wrongness _ he'd been willfully ignoring for the past few days surged up with all the immediacy of gunshot-panic, swooping the bottom out of his stomach in a dizzying wave that made him drop his head down and close his eyes to keep from… well, he didn't think he  _ could  _ faint, but it certainly felt like things were heading that way in their peculiar unformed weightlessness.

He didn't realise he was shaking until Buffy’s fingers closed over the back of his palm on the bench, her pink little nails vibrating with it. Watched them there while he dragged in one shuddery breath, another, desperate for air he didn't need and yet did, almost certain things were slithering in the corners of the room but couldn't be because this was Buffy’s kitchen and she was here, she was here, warm little palm solid and immutable over his.   


"Spike?!" she said (again?), stern in her worry.

He nodded, licking the roof of his mouth to confirm his tongue was free before he tried to use it. Swept his free hand over his face roughly and spoke before he could reconsider, because the wrongness was obvious now and something hair-raising in that he'd been so willingly blind to it. "Buffy. I think I need to tell you something."

  
  


** \--X-- **

  
  


"You were going to  _ what?"  _ she practically screeched at them, aware of the note of angry hysteria in her voice but unable or unwilling to try and smother it. Suspicious, oh yes, she'd been right there, the two of them plotting away behind her back and don't tell Buffy - the  _ slayer - _ whatever you think you've found out and schemed up, oh no, not like it’s her job or anything…   


"Attempt to contact a higher power to offer an exchange," Willow mumbled, growing quieter as Buffy grew louder.

"Of?"

"Souls." Spike's voice held no more volume than Willow's had, but there was a solidity underpinning it. Whatever the bottom of all this was, he was standing firm on it.   


She met his eyes, as hard with intensity as hers must be, and in them she found her explanation. "You wanted to offer yours for mine," she said numbly.   


His stubborn silence confirmed it.   


"And go back to what you were," she said, or asked, or would have asked but was suddenly afraid to, a cold pit yawning in her stomach and was it wrong of her that she didn't want either answer or any of this?

"No!" Spike said instantly, shaking his head, eyes widening fearfully. "No. Not that. Never."

Which meant.   


Sirens wailed through the fibres of her muscles, colliding and ricocheting and burning where they touched with desperation. Buffy closed her eyes, reaching for that rigid centre of self-control and authority. "Willow," she said tightly, opening her eyes but keeping them locked on the table, "upstairs.  _ Now _ ."   


From the corner of her vision she saw Willow turn over the possibility of objecting, then nod meekly and slip away. Maybe it was the way Spike had attempted to claim sole responsibility; maybe it was the white-knuckled grip Buffy had on the dining chair back in front of her. Either way, Willow's bedroom door clicked shut softly a minute later, leaving Buffy alone with Spike and their twin glares of trembling defiance.

"Of all the stupid schemes you've come up with, this takes the trophy," she muttered, letting go of the chair before it could end up broken, sweeping a hand through her hair to give it a task that wasn't punching him.   


"It's the right thing to do," he maintained stubbornly. "Shouldn't-" He looked down briefly, sullen guilt taking over his face. "Shouldn't have thought to keep it from you. Was wrong, see that now. But that don't change the facts."   


"Which are?" she demanded. Yes, they were beside the point, but a place to start. And since he'd started spilling, she'd better learn all she could before he clammed up again. (But most of all: this whole scene was playing straight from one of her nightmares, complete with all the sensation of powerlessness and inevitability, and she needed to hit pause, dammit, find a place where she could change it, just,  _ stop _ .)

Ten minutes later she had a bucket load of so-called facts with plot holes deep enough to drop the whole town in, and her anger had only been sharpened for the delay.   


"It's the best solution," he finished, sounding completely convinced of it. More;  _ wanting  _ it.   


"Be easy, wouldn't it?" she snarled. "Go out in a blaze of glory, saving the world. Have it all be over. Stop fighting, let everything end for you… All those times you've delivered it to others..." Her voice had quietened as she went on, drifting into a low whisper as she finished, "Alluring suggestion, wasn't it?"   


He couldn't deny it; the truth was written openly on his face. God, he looked so exhausted inside, all his show of stubborn strength run down to leave him with only a tired, silent request. For a moment she wanted to sit down and coax his head into her lap, touch him with gentle, soothing strokes and tell him to rest there. But there would be no comfort in that for either of them right now.   


She hardened her voice again, ready to demand of him, ever more from him, because this was Spike and he _could_ do it, even if he didn’t believe he could anymore. "You do _not_ get to quit like that," she snapped. "I don't give a flying fuck what the latest big bad says. What pretty lies it's told you. You stopped me from burning and I will damn well not let you do the same. You want to talk about fault? I'll tell you what's your fault. I'm still here. Because of you." She sat down in the chair opposite him and reached out to cover his hand with hers as she had earlier. "I'm here, Spike." _Whatever it's worth._ _Let me hold onto you. Please.  
_

_ Unless…  _ Liquid cold trickled through her, dousing much of her reflexive anger. "Do you…" she started with a slight wobble. "You're not my prisoner. If it's- if you don't want to be here - in this house - anymore, we can-"

"I don't want to leave you," he whispered quickly, pain and longing and regret pulling the liquid feeling from her to swirl instead in the blue of his eyes, open to her own. "Never, luv. You must know that." His gaze fell to the table again, watching his carefully motionless hand as he gave his head a tiny shake. "Can't be selfish though, can I?"

"So you're going to put what it wants ahead of what I want? What I need?" she hissed, feeling like it was a low blow, manipulation to counter manipulation, but dammit, something had to snap through to him.

A shudder ran across him, fear spilling through the cracks, then he shifted his fingers slightly to grasp onto the edge of hers. "It's so confusing," he whispered, then dropped his head down onto the table, burying his face in his arm. "Don't know what's real anymore," he said, words catching and cracking. "Don't know what're my own thoughts. Don't know…" His fingers tightened on hers, clinging to them. Almost... as though he was seeking confirmation.   


"It looks like me, doesn't it?" she asked, sure of the answer and that she should have seen it sooner.   


He sighed, sinking flatter onto the wood. "Yeah. Sometimes."

_ That bitch. If you want to really put Spike through the wringer, be Buffy. _ It wouldn't even need to invent the words to belittle him; she'd said them all.  _ That was then _ . "Spike… listen. If this is what I think it is - eyeless chanting minions, big evil, personalised 'ghosts' - I've fought it before. And… I lost."   


He was watching her now, head lifted at the note of sadness in her voice, a curious tilt to it as he searched for a place to comfort her, no doubt going to try and tell her she somehow hadn't lost, not really.   


"Sure, I stopped the apparitions, but they'd done enough of a number on Angel that I found him waiting for the sunrise on the bluff," she explained. "And I begged him, like I'd never begged for anything, to  _ live _ , so that he could be more than the monster he hated. And when he wouldn't, I begged him to do it for  _ me _ . But he refused to try. He was going to let himself burn right there in front of me." Her voice threatened to break on her, and she rushed on, "The Powers That Be stepped in, brought a snowstorm so the sun never rose, protecting whatever their interests were in him. But I'd lost. I wasn't enough." God, it still hurt, long known though it was. What did she think she was doing, bringing this up as a sick motivational speech? She'd given Angel  _ everything,  _ all the love that had flowed out of her then as easily as breathing, and it hadn't meant a thing. She'd given Spike nothing, and she was asking him for more.   


Only she wasn't. Not begging him to be more. She took a deep breath, feeling that old pain retreat again and the certainty trickle back. "There's no higher powers on our side, Spike. There's just you and me. No destiny or prophecy or curse pushed you to do the right thing.  _ You _ looked at what you'd done, and  _ you _ fought to change. Because you  _ are _ more than a monster. I  _ know  _ you are." She was probably bruising his hand now with the death grip she had on it, afraid that if she relented in the least he'd slip away from her, those frightened blue eyes would dodge aside from the force of the emotion now crushing her chest and close down into the comfort of the dark inside. "I won't beg you to stay, to fight this with me. To make yourself more. Because I don't need to. You're the strongest person I've ever known, and I  _ know _ you can do it. If you can't believe in yourself right now, know that I do."

His eyes narrowed, searching hers for truth or untruth or some last excuse that would make it okay to take the out that'd been dangled so enticingly before him.  _ Please, Spike.  _ The suspicion slowly gave way to a look of timid hope, and she knew she'd reached him.   


Relief washed into her, loosening the tendons in her fingers at last and making her feel like laughing hysterically. For some impossible reason, Spike  _ still _ trusted her, and he would follow her lead away from that easy downward slope.   


"Believe in you too," he said finally, a shaky little smile of relief on his face. "Can do it, l- Buffy, whatever you need. Just thought that…" He turned away briefly to shake his head to himself. "Shoulda bloody known. Not supposed to be easy, is it? Can't turn around and do something good and call that that when you've…" His hand withdrew from hers gently to fold in around his chest again, though he turned his face back to hers to soften the retreat.

The words panged through her, dull-edged and drawn-out. She didn't know what she might need. And he was right, if for the wrong reasons - whatever happened, it was going to be hard. For a long time. In some ways, forever. Clinging and crawling, crying defiance and pain. "Do you regret it?" she asked. "The soul?"  _ Would I? _ He'd sounded so certain he didn't want to go back to (un)life without it, more so than she could be sure she would be in the same position. Everything had been so  _ easy _ during the time that bitch of a roommate had been draining hers.

"No," he said quietly, tightening his arms over himself as if to shield it from the very suggestion. "Needed it.  _ Need _ it." A wince crossed his face, then he looked off into the middle distance, pulling words from there slowly. "And… more than that… Almost like a different sense. Can feel things now, in a way that wasn't there before." He quirked a sardonic little grin. "Course, they're all bloody painful things, but that's how it goes, isn't it?" The pleading uncertainty he couldn't quite hide made her ache again, but before she could think of how to respond it had melted away into a look of faint wonder. "Or most of them are," he whispered.   


Her hand still sat on the table where he'd left it, a pale stranded fish on the expanse of dark wood. She rolled it over, palm up, belly up, and slid it slightly further across. "Spike, if this thing is out to get me," -which she wasn't so sure of really, it was running two for two on the ensouled-vamp attacks now, but that point was hardly going to encourage him- "if, like you said, it knows to target the things I care about, the things that give me strength, then that's you, you idiot," she said gently. "You were right to come back. Don't let it undo that."   


He eyed her waiting hand with a mixture of longing and sadness, checked her face carefully again, then settled his fingers into hers with slow, cautious movements. She stroked the side of his hand with her thumb, the element of gentle, soothing touch that she'd felt urged to deliver finding placation there. Was she soothing herself or him? It was getting harder to tell who their mutual cautiousness was for. Both, perhaps;  _ we're as raw as each other. _ Either way, he relaxed into it, sagging closer to the table as he let go the tight hold he had around himself.   


_ Why, Spike?  _ Her hands were delicate tools of death, stake-calloused, steel-boned and electric-nerved, yet he softened trustingly into putty in them still. Into the clay of a man. Clay she'd split and bled these knuckles on, gouged at and spit upon, tried to drown in and finally turned her back on because it was only dead clay, in the end, and she was an artist of the killing blow and the final step of the dance, not one of creation. It was his incongruous -dead- artist's hands that knew how to kindle life, fire, a spark, that brought them to her again and again as he offered his misshapen self for the kiln;  _ is this what you want yet? _   


_ What about what you want, Spike?  _ Always afraid to ask. And he in no state to answer.   


And probably a certain egotistical evil about to flip its shit.

"Think I wasn't supposed to tell you," he said in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, as though he'd read her mind. An uneasy glance around the room, then he added, "It's not gonna be happy."   


"It's evil. It's supposed to be unhappy," she said firmly. Unhappy enough to come out and face her would be nice, instead of all this skulking around behind her back. "It's the thing beneath us, isn't it? Ghosts, eyeless priests, ' _ it devours'?" _ Because two big bads would be too much. Unless they took each other out. Politely, and someplace far away from here.

"Think… yeah, think it is. And me. Beneath. Inside…" He heaved a breath, gritting himself against another of those disturbing wanders. "Yes. In the school basement, mostly. Reaches out down below from there."

Hellmouth. Naturally. He watched her expectantly, waiting to be given a plan to replace the one she'd stomped on.  _ Here we go… _ Willow upstairs either sulking in her room or… she wouldn't be planning to try anything, would she? Dawn was definitely sulking in hers. Xander. Anya. Rest of townspeople. Giles. Six billion-something other people- Right. Start here, in her hand. "I need to talk to Willow. I want you to go and get your bed, and move it to my room." He started to object, but she raised her free hand in a cutting-off gesture. "I don't think you should be down there right now. If you can't adult-up and share a room with me politely while we sort this out, put your bed in Dawn’s room for me and take mine."  _ 'Adult-up', Buffy?  _ She turned to nod towards the basement door, steamrollering past her uncomfortable fluster. "If there's anything down there… yell out for me."

  
  
  


Willow had never  _ actually _ been going to actually go ahead with anything on the sly, had been planning to talk to Buffy once the research was done, or the supplies arrived, or some other vague deadline. Yuh-huh.   


Buffy wanted to believe her. Wanted to be free to simply decide to. She held in her bitter anger that she couldn't afford the risk, and tried to find a path through the discussion that would hit the right notes between warning and reassuring. In the end she was only left with,  _ why? _ Why hadn't Willow spoken to her, why had she thought listening to an insane vampire was sensible, why was she so willing to dive headfirst into what must be a pretty oomphy thwack of magic casting compared to the nothing she'd been doing since she came back?   


Willow's answer to the last echoed shades of Spike’s; "I thought it might be a way to…" Apologise. Atone. Pay. Do the big thing to make up for something.   


Listening to the insane vampire? "What he told me he'd worked out… it makes a kind of sense, Buffy. And it's like what the coven, Giles, was talking about - balance."   


Great.  _ The First Evil is my punishment for rudely living beyond my expiry date?  _ Or… again, two-for-two on the bullying of newly souled vampires. Angel, whose soul her team had been responsible for glueing back on, and whom it had initially attempted to take her out with (and his soul besides). Spike, who'd done the impossible (and as antithetical to evil as an act could get) and  _ asked  _ for a soul, and it had gone straight for the kill. With a side of… why had it wanted her involved? Why wait until this week?   


She shook her head. Questions to mull over later. That why only mattered now if the answer showed her how to kill it. First, untangle what damage it had done here.   


"Why didn't you talk to me, Wil?" she asked again, followed by a sigh of resignation. Of course Willow hadn’t. Had any of them really been talking? She'd thought there'd been a hint of genuine contact last weekend, between herself and Spike, understated though it was. But obviously not. She still didn't even know how the hell he'd managed to  _ get _ himself a soul; neither had she asked how he felt about the decision in retrospect until tonight. As much as she'd have liked to say she hadn't wanted to pry into something so personal… the truth had more to do with fear of the possible answers. And between her and Willow, there'd been even less connection.   


Willow's voice came out stoic and sympathetic, believably honest in its unsmiling admission, "I just thought it would be easier for you if everything was ready to go when we told you, so you wouldn't have to wait."

"Easier… you thought I would agree." She wasn't sure if the paleness in her voice was for Willow having assumed she'd go right along with the idea, or for the fact that she'd obviously given Willow the impression that she would. That he was  _ expendable;  _ that Willow was here for the use of her power. She sat down in the chair beside Willow's door, her legs suddenly brittle.   


"It was what he wanted. And I know you've had to help him because of the soul and everything, and he's Spike, but if he's choosing for himself then he's not your responsibility anymore."  _ There _ was the smile, that look of,  _ see, everything tidied away, _ sickening now because, god, that must be how it looked from where Willow was standing; poor Buffy stuck looking after the ex...something... that she obviously wasn't comfortable around but was  _ obligated _ to care for and be kind to-

"I _don't_ have to help him!" she all-but-screamed. "He-" _tried to fucking rape me! You don't know a damn thing!_ Buffy snapped her jaw closed, squinted her eyes shut and tried to grab that inner-calmness mumbo-jumbo bullcrap again. Breathe. Willow's eyes had gone big and round, shocked and startled, though her mouth was mercifully silent. _Of course you wouldn't know a thing._ Buffy took another deep breath, blowing it out through her lips slowly. "He hurt me, Willow. That's why he left," she said quietly. "And I hurt him. I hurt him so much. God, we hurt each other _so_ _much…_ " her voice wobbled out on her and she sniffed down at her lap, suddenly fighting tears. "We screwed everything up so, so badly. But-" Freeze. Gulp. She looked up at Willow, begging her to understand, someone to understand what she couldn't begin to explain in words. "I can't lose him, Willow," she sniffled. _Please, don't let me lose him.  
_

"Buffy…" Willow said, then she was hovering in front of her, hands out in an awkward offer of a hug.   


Had they hugged since Willow came back? They must have- yes, had, at that first greeting, fleeting and false; it didn’t feel like it, from the unfamiliarity of Willow's frame intertwined with her own now. Buffy hugged her back carefully, mindful of her own strength, mindful of their interspersed palisades, mindful of the last memorable contact between them being fists and fury and just, pain.   


"I'm sorry," Willow said tentatively as she pulled back. "I didn't know. I mean, you're all with the slayery coldness whenever I see you two near each other, and I just assumed…"

"Am I?" she asked faintly.  _ Is that what it looks like to him?  _ No, he would see through it, know she was just afraid of hurting either of them further… or he would if he looked, which he'd hardly dared to… She sighed again. "It's… complicated. Everything. Everything's just so…" She waved her hand weakly in gesture.   


Willow nodded, sympathy on her face again. "You don't have to- It's okay, Buffy, if you don't want to talk about it. Or if you don't know what you'd say if you did. 'Don't lose Spike', I've got it. And I really was going to bring this to you."

"I know." She did, now, the whole thing plainly visible in Willow-vision, the way she'd have proudly presented her tidily packaged solution. "Thanks."

"I'm sorry I wasn't…" Willow grimaced, "Well, about the last year, I guess."

Buffy smiled, almost chuckled, because really, that was it, wasn't it? "We're  _ all  _ sorry about the last year, Willow," she said dryly. Endlessly, uselessly,  _ sorry. _   


Buffy let the feeling hang for a moment, then shook it off and stood up. There was no space for falling apart. There never was. "This evil we've offended. Can you ring Xander? And, um," and this was going to be the disturbing part, "tell him not to take any phone calls from me unless you or Dawn confirm that it's actually me? I don't know if anyone else can see it, but this thing's been swanning around in my face." A second's thought, then she added with dawning realisation, "Or from Spike." Not that Xander wouldn't be suspicious of a call from him anyway, but forewarned, fore-prepared-to-blame-the-correct-party and all that. "Or from anyone else who's ever been dead. If you can't poke them to see if they're really them, don't trust a word they say." And she needed to warn- "You don't think it's talked to Giles, do you?" The lack of return calls suddenly took on a significance beyond worrying about his safety and grumbling at his lack of helpfulness. "You'd better contact him too. Leave a message if you have to…" Could it affect those? Emails? Was there a book somewhere she was supposed to have studied,  _ Rules of Incorporeality _ or something?   


"Got it," Willow said, eager and confident. "Phone tree activate."

"And Anya…" Buffy paused, toying with her lip. "Tell her to come over here, as soon as she can." It was late - she'd been thinking bedtime before everything blew out on her - but who knew what hours Anya kept these days.   


Willow nodded decisively, and Buffy moved onto Dawn’s room to expand upon her thirty-second explanation of, 'Evil ghostish thing might be coming, could look like me, scream if you see anything'. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be away from civilisation for the next two weeks, so might not update again until I return sorry.  
> Happy holidays, everyone 💙


End file.
